Any Corporate Planning Exercise Should Take Into Account Both Internal and External Consistencies. Discuss.
Student No. 0813504
“Any corporate planning exercise should take into account both internal and external consistencies. Discuss.”
Igor Ansoff, known as father of strategic management, once wrote “No business can consider itself immune to the threats of product obsolescence and saturation of demand … In some industries, surveillance of the environment for threats and opportunities needs to be a continuous process.”[i] Organizations across the world today have introduced the corporate planning exercise - a comprehensive framework to coordinate decisions about individual strategic issues into a consistent set of strategies for the entire company. Consequently, strategies achieve long-term competition advantage with undeviating effects. The corporate planning process involves several steps – assessing the situation, defining the critical issues, specifying and implementing the decisions, and finally monitoring the decisions and making adjustments as events unfold. The assessment stage involves severe consideration of current strategies, capabilities and environment to identify the relevant opportunities and threats, including internal and external consistencies, which shall be elaborated further in the essay. Strategic Portfolio Analysis[ii] is also applied in different divisions. The Gap analysis[iii] is used during the final monitoring process where alternative strategies help to bridge the predicted gap between current strategies and projected performance. Indubitably, there exist many guidelines for the implementation of strategies to produce ideal results of high return with low risk. It is definitely crucial that the strategies have to be both internally and externally consistent. The two factors underlying internal consistencies are organizational objectives and available resources. The effectiveness of corporate strategies largely depends on its suitability to the company’s particular set of resources. Types of resources include
“Any corporate planning exercise should take into account both internal and external consistencies. Discuss.”
Igor Ansoff, known as father of strategic management, once wrote “No business can consider itself immune to the threats of product obsolescence and saturation of demand … In some industries, surveillance of the environment for threats and opportunities needs to be a continuous process.”[i] Organizations across the world today have introduced the corporate planning exercise - a comprehensive framework to coordinate decisions about individual strategic issues into a consistent set of strategies for the entire company. Consequently, strategies achieve long-term competition advantage with undeviating effects. The corporate planning process involves several steps – assessing the situation, defining the critical issues, specifying and implementing the decisions, and finally monitoring the decisions and making adjustments as events unfold. The assessment stage involves severe consideration of current strategies, capabilities and environment to identify the relevant opportunities and threats, including internal and external consistencies, which shall be elaborated further in the essay. Strategic Portfolio Analysis[ii] is also applied in different divisions. The Gap analysis[iii] is used during the final monitoring process where alternative strategies help to bridge the predicted gap between current strategies and projected performance. Indubitably, there exist many guidelines for the implementation of strategies to produce ideal results of high return with low risk. It is definitely crucial that the strategies have to be both internally and externally consistent. The two factors underlying internal consistencies are organizational objectives and available resources. The effectiveness of corporate strategies largely depends on its suitability to the company’s particular set of resources. Types of resources include