Conceptual Learning Summary

Strategic Planning Concepts
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Alan Lankein, a renowned business scholar describes planning as "bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now". It involves predicting all the possible outcomes if a given course is taken by the business owner, army commander, political leader and any decision maker within our society. The moment you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there; moreover, not taking the necessary initiatives to plan is planning to fail. Strategic planning has a colorful history that can be traced back to the ancient Greek civilization. The work ‘Strategy’ is derived from the Greek word ‘STRATEGOS’ which refers to general or Army leader (Ryans & Shanklin, 1985). In the early 1920s, the Harvard Business School developed a model called the Harvard policy model that has come to be dubbed as the root of the modern strategic planning. The model involves the systematic assessment and analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat popularly known as SWOT analysis.
Roney C.W. in Strategic Management Methodology: Generally Accepted Principles for Practitioners notes that “ after almost four decades of research, the effects of strategic planning on an organization are massive; front line managers, academicians and industry analysts portray it to be a central management and governance discipline, more so in the modern rapidly changing operational conditions.”
One well known and the key concept to strategic planning is that strategic planning involves choosing specific priorities. In the service sector, as in the case of Top Notch consultants, their mission was to make all clients better through passion, design and the fierce pursuit of innovation (Roney, 2004). The principal company activities as per January 2015 were the development, marketing and distribution of top-notch public relations services, both at corporate and individual level. The organization services were engineered to fit the customers’ demand. These included print campaigns that involved Top Notch sending out press releases to various media outlets (Ryans & Shanklin, 1985). The press members would then use these ...