Corporate planning—a conceptual critique

Corporate planning is accepted by some as being an effective, efficient, and feasible means of charting the path an enterprise takes through the future. In this paper the author questions both the concept and the contribution of corporate planning. The author examines not only the problem of budgetary analysis within a planning process but also questions the ability of corporate planning to provide the necessary perspective of the future in any identifiable or probabilistic sense. The author postulates ‘the guts of corporate planning’. In the author's own word conceptual critiques ‘may be defined as setting up your own straw man in place of the other fellow's sawdust totem’. However, this paper presents some controversial yet fundamental criticisms of the current concepts of corporate planning. It is for the reader to judge whether the straw or the sawdust is deepest.