"[Planning] means both to assess the future and make provision for it." (Henri Fayol, General and industrial management, 1919)
"To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well." (Isaac Asimov, The Merchant Princes, 1944)
"Organization planning is the process of defining and grouping the activities of the enterprise so that they may be most logically assigned and effectively executed. It is concerned with the establishment of relationships among the units so as to further the objectives of the enterprise." (Ernest Dale, "Planning and developing the company organization structure", 1952)
"Planning is essentially the analysis and measurement of materials and processes in advance of the event and the perfection of records so that we may know exactly where we are at any given moment. In short it is attempting to steer each operation and department by chart and compass and chronometer - not by guess and by God." (Lyndall Urwick, "The Pattern of Management", 1956)
"Management is a distinct process consisting of planning, organizing, actuating and controlling, performed to determine and accomplish the objectives by the use of people and resources." (George R Terry, "Principles of Management", 1960)
"Planning is thinking beforehand how something is to be made or done, and mixing imagination with the product - which in a broad sense makes all of us planners." (Paul Williams, "The Influence of Planning on Man's Destiny", [speech] 1962)
"[...] long-range plans are most valuable when they are revised and adjusted and set anew at shorter periods. The five-year plan is reconstructed each year in turn for the following five years. The soundest basis for this change is accurate measurement of the results of the first year's experience with the plan against the target of the plan." (George S Odiorne, "Management by Objectives", 1965)
"Targets set by individual managers are relevant to the company's goals because the entire management group is involved in the total planning process." (Walter S Wilkstrom, "Managing by-and-with Objectives", 1968)
"Planning is the design of a desired future and of effective ways of bringing it about." (Russell L Ackoff, "A concept of corporate planning", 1969)
"The leading attempt at a complete normative theory of planning and resource allocation is provided by the concept of 'strategy'." (Joseph L Bower, "Managing the resource allocation process", 1970)
"As in war, strategic success depends on tactical effectiveness, and no degree of planning can lessen management's tactical imperatives. The first responsibility of the executive, anyway, is to the here and now. If he makes a shambles of the present, there may be no future; and the real purpose of planning - the one whose neglect is common, but poisonous - is to safeguard and sustain the company in subsequent short-run periods." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"Good results without good planning come from good luck, not good management." (David Jaquith, "The Time Trap", 1972
"How executives plan or what numbers they choose doesn't count; what does is the standard of performance they are ready to exact. The essence of any objective is that reaching it should be reasonable. The precondition is that you expect it to be met."
"In the objectives system, the corporation's aims, or plans, are broken down into a hierarchy of lesser aims or plans; and the grand total of all those objectives adds up to those of the corporation. Then all the executives have to do is meet their planned and agreed objectives and - hey presto - the corporation does the same. Perfection in management, at last, has arrived, except that it hasn't and won't." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"Planning and management by objectives have their point as devices for compelling thought, so long as executives don't forget that any plan worth making is inaccurate; the longer a plan takes to write, the worse it is - just because of its consumption of time. And the more they change plans to suit events, the better they will manage - if you've made a mistake, you had better admit it."
"What goes wrong [in long-range planning] is that sensible anticipation gets converted into foolish numbers: and their validity always hinges on large loose assumptions." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)
"Strategic planning is not the 'application of scientific methods to business decision' […] . It is the application of thought, analysis, imagination, and judgment. It is responsibility, rather than technique. […] Strategy planning is not forecasting. […] Strategic planning is necessary precisely because we cannot forecast. […] Strategic planning does nor deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. […] Strategic planning is not an attempt to eliminate risk. It is not even an attempt to minimize risk."
"A competent manager can usually explain necessary planning changes in terms of specific facts which have contributed to the change. The existing fear, or attitude of failure, which results from missed completion dates should be replaced by a more constructive fear of failing to keep a plan updated." (Philip F Gehring Jr. & Udo W Pooch, "Advances in Computer Programming Management", 1980)
"An essential feature of all strategic planning is a forecast of the world ahead - or, at best, a forecast of those parts of the environment that will have significant impact on the company's successes and failures. Of course, there will be a variety of uncertainties, and our strategic planning will have to deal with them. Nevertheless, forecast we must if we are to grasp full advantage of the changes that lie ahead." (Boris Yavitz & William H Newman, "Strategy in Action", 1982)
"Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions."
"Managerial accounting calls attention to problems and the need for action. It also aids in planning and decision making. It is aimed more at control and less at valuation than financial accounting." (John A Reinecke & William F Schoell, "Introduction to Business", 1983)
"Managing in accordance with a strategic plan is a learned art. The longer you use the tool, the better you are able to manage with it." (R Henry Miglione, "An MBO Approach to Long-Range Planning", 1983)
"[...] strategic planning and crisis management are complimentary. They coexist comfortably because both deal with the management of change. Crisis management concentrates on those brief moments of instability that must be dealt with first in order to get on with the larger and less time-sensitive job of reaching strategic objectives." (Gerald C Meyers, "When It Hits the Fan", 1986)
"Good people can fix a lot of flaws in poor planning, but it's never the other way around." (Roland Shmitt, "Government Executive", 1987)
"In complex situations, we may rely too heavily on planning and forecasting and underestimate the importance of random factors in the environment. That reliance can also lead to delusions of control." (Hillel J Einhorn & Robin M. Hogarth, Harvard Business Review, 1987)
"Problems can be reduced by allowing employees to help plan changes rather than directing them to execute a plan made by others." (Eugene Raudsepp, MTS Digest, 1987)
"[Successful organizations] comprehend uncertainty. They set direction, not detailed strategy. They are the best strategists precisely because they are suspicious of forecasts and open to surprise. They think strategic planning is great as long as no one takes the plans too seriously." (Robert H Waterman, "The Renewal Factor", 1987)
"Unpredictability cannot be removed, or perhaps even substantially reduced, by excessive planning." (Tom Peters, "Thriving on Chaos", 1987)
"Financial planning models do not always ask the right questions [...] We think that financial planning models are necessary, but we also think they should carry the label: Let the user beware!" (Stephen A Ross & Randolph W. Westerfield, "Corporate Finance", 1988)
"The thinking that underpins strategic planning is a legacy of more stable times when the environment was changing sufficiently slowly for an effective corporate response to emerge from methodical organisational routines." (Max Boisot, "Information Space", 1995)
"Strategic planning can generally be thought of as a three stage process: (i) carrying out analyses of the organisation’s external context and of its internal conditions and the resources at its disposal (ii) identifying and developing different strategic choices (scenarios) and evaluating their attractiveness to the organisation (iii) implementing the preferred strategy." (Roger Jones & Neil Murra, "Change, Strategy and Projects at Work", 2008)
"The planning fallacy is the systematic tendency for project plans and budgets to undershoot. […] The reasons for the planning fallacy are partly psychological, partly cultural, and partly to do with our limited ability to think probabilistically." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change", 2015)
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