Strategic planning for social and political change

Formalized planning is currently applied to planning for operations and capital investment, planning for products and markets, and occasionally for manpower. However, there is little evidence that companies are producing formal plans and programmes to deal with social and political change. Unfortunately, public opinion is moving against business, action groups inside and outside companies are challenging the authority of management, and public officials and politicians are already framing new laws and regulations. Unless managers begin to get more involved in the framing of these controls they are likely to find laws enacted and enforced by people who have little knowledge or sympathy with business. In this article the author points up the necessity to assess the social and political challenge to their business, and formulate and implement social and political strategies and plans aimed at ensuring the survival and prosperity of their organisations.     

Coordinating business strategy and technical planning

Business managers face the decisions discussed in this article regularly. Without a systematic framework, the business context for these decisions is more difficult to establish and to communicate in a company. Where technology is the life-blood of the company, the strategic decision-makers can ill-afford to have the technological resources allocated in a suboptimal fashion. Nor can they afford a business strategy which does not recognize the implications of their technological assets. This article describes an approach to technological strategy formulation that has successfully achieved this.     

企业战略与信息系统战略规划集成过程研究

随着信息系统在企业中应用的发展、变化以及整个市场环境的变化 ,企业战略规划和信息系统战略规划的集成已经成为必然趋势 .本文在评述集成过程方法的基础上 ,针对信息系统应用不同阶段 ,探讨了不同集成过程的特点 ;并且根据变革时期环境对企业提出的挑战 ,研究了变革时期的集成过程的总体框架和组合模型     

Linking IT planning to business strategy

Information Strategy Planning is of growing importance. There are available a variety of formal methodologies for carrying out information systems planning, none of which are particularly well aligned to the current business planning views. The author was concerned that the value of the approaches used in business planning, most notably those of Michael Porter, were being ignored by the information systems planning methodologies. Both mechanisms yield insight and both are required to make strategic gains from IT. The paper explains the experience at Simon Engineering in combining Porter's value chain and five forces approach with the more usual Information Engineering methodology for information planning. A workshop approach was adopted and the conclusions drawn that the information strategy must be seen and developed as an integral part of, and at the same time as, the business strategy, and that both Information Engineering and Porter's approaches are necessary component parts of creating an integrated business and IT strategy. IT strategies cannot be developed independently of the business strategy, nor should they follow the business strategy. Successful IT strategies must be developed at the same time as the business strategy.     

The marketing strategy worksheet—A practical planning tool

The Marketing Strategy Worksheet is a simple aid to strategic planners. It enables a coherent and integrated plan to be produced and communicated to others. It is a three-level flow chart comprising an analytical stage, formulation of some key primary decisions and subsequent settlement of strategic issues within the marketing mix. The analytical stage incorporates both external and internal analysis. The primary decisions concern company objectives, marketing objectives, demand management, target market and positioning. Using the conventional marketing mix format, decisions are made about product, promotion, distribution and price.     

A method for planning long term strategy in basic industries

Standard market studies may provide a valid estimate of future demand, but they are unable to furnish objective data about future supply and selling prices. Consequently any profitability or feasibility study making use of standard methods involves a large amount of guess-work disguised as scientific data, with the resulting probability of error. This probability is most true and most dangerous in heavy industry.The method described here does not attempt to determine actual future supply, this is impossible. Instead, it strives to define potential supply by conducting a worldwide study of the opportunities for creating new production units able to operate at low cost.The method, makes it possible to select the soundest and most profitable of the possible projects, without concern for those of competitors, since these will already have been analyzed within the framework of the study. The author claims that this method can provide objective estimates of long term return on investment, by taking as an average selling price the cost of sales of the last competitor on the list of those whose output is needed to meet normal demand.     

U.K. chemicals—Strategic planning or industrial strategy

A distinction is drawn between chemical industry strategic planning and planning related to particular products, markets and investments.

For the past decade, the industry has collaborated closely with government and unions on industry and sector planning studies, mainly through the Chemicals EDC and its working parties. Recent government legislation and policy has sought to formalise the joint planning process through planning agreements and an industrial strategy, these being mainly concerned with specific investments and market developments. Problems inherent in this approach are discussed.

Some major strategic issues involving both government and industry are identified.     

基于政府角色转换的企业政治资源、策略与绩效之间的相互影响

认为政府在企业政治活动中主要扮演3种角色--消费者、投资者和裁判员,而这种角色转换反映了企业政治资源、企业政治策略、政府合同、竞争性战略与企业政治绩效之间的关系.因此,基于企业政治资源、企业政治策略与企业政治绩效相互影响的理论模型以及10个研究假设,以我国企业作为研究对象,利用问卷调查获得的数据,运用因子分析法验证并解释我国企业政治资源、企业政治策略以及企业政治绩效的类型与层次,采用结构方程方法对我国企业的这种关系进行分析,并验证了其中的大部分假设以及主要观点,对前人有关的部分结论提供了数据支持.     

An integrated strategy for a production planning and warehouse layout problem: Modeling and solution approaches

We study a real-world production warehousing case, where the company always faces the challenge to find available space for its products and to manage the items in the warehouse. To resolve the problem, an integrated strategy that combines warehouse layout with the capacitated lot-sizing problem is presented, which have been traditionally treated separately in the existing literature. We develop a mixed integer linear programming model to formulate the integrated optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the total cost of production and warehouse operations. The problem with real data is a large-scale instance that is beyond the capability of optimization solvers. A novel Lagrangian relax-and-fix heuristic approach and its variants are proposed to solve the large-scale problem. The preliminary numerical results from the heuristic approaches are reported.     

Marketing planning and corporate planning

The market planning subset of the corporate planning process has unique difficulties associated with technical, organizational and behavioural problems. A major technical problem is that of getting the company sales forecast right. The paper suggests a check-list for budget reviewers aimed at producing more realism in forecasting (Section II).Organizational problems are discussed in terms of allowing time for full concurrence between budget framers and reviewers (Section III). The little-discussed behavioural problems associated with the interface between line management and marketing staff specialists are outlined in Section IV with some suggestions for overcoming them.     

The role of political ties and political uncertainty in corporate innovation

We examine the relationship between firms' political connections and corporate innovation in a European context. We also consider the moderating effect of political connections on the relationship between political uncertainty and firms' innovation. We use two different metrics of innovation: R&D (an input measure), and patent counts (an output measure). We find that firms with former politicians on their board of directors invest less in R&D than their counterpart firms. However, the presence of this type of director on the board is positively associated with the number of a firm's patent applications. It seems that, although political ties reduce the amount of resources devoted to R&D activities, they increase the effectiveness of intellectual rights protection. Results also show that political uncertainty decreases R&D investment but exacerbates the need for legal protection of innovation through patents. According to our results, political connections attenuate the effect of political uncertainty on firm innovation such that the negative (positive) effect of uncertainty on R&D intensity (patents) weakens when the firm is politically connected.     

Leader political support: Reconsidering leader political behavior

Historically, organizational politics and political leader behavior have been framed and characterized negatively, as self-serving and counter-productive. However, scholars have noted that political acts can achieve positive ends, and have called for further discussions of positive forms of political leadership. Continuing in this recent stream of research on positive perspectives on organizational politics, a framework of leader political support is proposed, suggesting that the positive features of leader political behavior, and testable propositions are developed. The leader political support construct is defined and its antecedents are explicated utilizing a social capital perspective. Additionally, social exchange theory is used to explain the consequences of leader political support. Contributions to both leadership and organizational politics literatures and directions for future research are discussed.     

Public participation in corporate planning— strategic management in a Kibitzer's world

In this article the author argues that there are three main challenges for the company which wishes to be known for its strategic prowess. These are the need to search a changing environment with respect to both threats and opportunities. The second challenge is to ensure organizational response, while the third—that which is least understood—is the challenge of coping with an active intrusive environment which is made up of individuals and organizations which seek to influence the strategic decision of the enterprise.The author does not offer a series of ready-made answers to the problems posed, but rather, suggests that planners need to take cognizance of the third challenge when developing strategies.     

Between a rock and a hard place: Internal- and external institutional fit of MNE subsidiary political strategy in contexts of institutional upheaval

We investigate how subsidiaries' political capabilities in emerging markets are not just shaped by their home- or host country institutions, but by both simultaneously - presenting a dilemma for subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in host countries. Subsidiaries need to develop CPA that simultaneously “fit” parent company requirements and “external fit” requirements in relation to the host environment. Achieving this dual fit is particularly difficult in volatile host contexts, where the value of political capabilities changes rapidly. Subsidiaries face a dilemma because the easily transferable capabilities – that draw on parent resources – lose value due to their decreasing “external fit” with the host country's volatile institutional environment. Conversely, the most valuable relational political capabilities lack “internal fit,” as they may not be legitimate in the home environment. To understand how firms deal with this dilemma, we develop a typology of political capabilities that takes into account their transferability/stickiness and their dynamic institutional contingency in the host country. Our study shows that MNEs - even from institutionally very different economies - can successfully transfer political capabilities to develop effective CPA in a volatile political environment. Yet, as political risk becomes discontinuous, this strategy may reach its limits.     

Futurology and planning

This paper is not intended to be an exhaustive exposition of futurological and predictive studies, but rather an indication of the kinds of approach which institutes devoted to this subject are making, methods used and the ideas which are being developed.     

Integration of process planning and production planning and control in cellular manufacturing

Organisations willing to succeed in global competition have to integrate their internal and external processes. This especially includes planning and production control (PPC) processes. Optimised allocation of the production resources and quick response to demand changes result in lower cost and improvement of production performance. Practitioners and researchers have been trying to achieve these goals using production planning techniques. Although the results are significant, it seems necessary to integrate production operations in order to improve the production performance. The goals, information and decisions taken in production planning and control and process planning are often very different and difficult to integrate in Cellular Manufacturing (CM) environments. Designing an efficient PPC system and integrating it with process planning in a cellular environment is of the same importance. The following paper proposes first a comprehensive framework of integrated process planning and production planning and control in CM. Then, with respect to this framework and utilising the domain knowledge in the area of CM systems, an integrated model based on Integrated Definition Modeling Language is developed. The application of the models has been considered as a case study for a production system in electronics and telecommunication sector in a plant in Iran. The validity and completeness of the proposed model is tested by a panel of experts in the areas of production planning and control in CM environments.     

Strategic planning and inflation

The author of this article argues that inflation is a neglected area in corporate planning despite the events of 1974/1975. The planning problem which companies face because of inflation is defined, while acknowledging that it is difficult to solve. Recent experience has shown that inflation has a direct impact on every major area of business. Thus it is essential that there is a meaningful attempt to handle these problems in planning. The author discusses his approach to grasping this nettle.