This document discusses several ideas related to strategic planning in businesses: - Strategic planning should involve employees at all levels of a company and become part of the company culture, not just a task for top officials. - Successful companies like Google and Facebook use an open concept that allows employees to pitch ideas directly to leadership. - Companies should make use of all their resources, including ideas from employees at all levels, as these employees may have solutions the company has not considered. - Entry-level employees from colleges can provide innovative ideas through mentorship programs. - Managing human resources and ideas well can improve strategic planning by generating more ideas for the company's future.

1. Delroy V.W. Mukungatu
The Future of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is a complicated concept. Instead of it being a duty amongst top
officials to sit down for weeks over long tables and expensive bottled water, trying to find
the perfect words for their mission statements. Strategic planning should be more like a
tradition amongst officials and management including all employees of the firm. It should
be a culture that does not stop when they leave the office, but actually becomes a part of
their lifestyle.
The Summary
The article by Bill Conerly, The Death of Strategic Planning: Why? Discuses how
strategic planning has impacted businesses in a positive and negative way. It explains
how the inability to predict the future has made strategic planning obsolete. The article
also focuses on how the planning has inspired business leaders to think about the future
of their businesses. In the second section Bill provides a list of programs that business
leaders can embark on like thinking about the future, involving current and new products
in their plans, addressing potential changes and set aside a budget for emergencies that
might strike the company in future. He ends by emphasizing how important it is to
separate reality from fantasy by knowing that amongst all their plans it is most likely that
they will hardly come out with a perfect forecast.
Being Open
In today’s business world, some of the big companies still stick to the small ways of
performing strategic planning, like the open concept. This type of planning goes a long
way in providing better ideas and visions that concern a company’s future. This concept
helps cultivate a healthy creative work environment in which workers perceive that
creative thoughts and ideas are welcomed and valued (Williams.pg139). Instead of
having top officials spend all their time deciding which direction to steer the ship. Most
successful companies like Google and Facebook have opened the flow to talent. This has
shortened the traditional hierarchical channel that ideas usually follow through in an
organization and end up getting lost anyway. They have changed this channel to a totally
opposite one-way system that delivers the message straight to its destination. This
method makes sure that the organizational, supervisory and work group encouragement is
always available to provide employees with the support they need to keep on coming up
with creative ideas (Williams.pg139).
These companies are set up in a way that employees are able to see top officials everyday
and pitch in their ideas, even if they have only been with the company for a few days or
weeks. If it is a good idea then it will make it to where it’s supposed to reach. This is also
true in the real estate market in this time. Open concept properties are considered future
designs and people will pay more to have the opportunity to entertain their guests whilst
cooking dinner or preparing a snack. This method is highly efficient and can transform
the connections and atmosphere of doing business under pressure. Even the guests also

2. enjoy the pleasure of chatting with their hosts as everyone waits for the meal to be ready.
The advantages of this concept are limitless when it comes to the psychological effect
this structure has on employees. It improves their flow, who they are and what they are
doing becomes one (Williams.pg139). It just makes sense to be open, as opposed to
having closed sections of the house that make precious moments everyone should enjoy
oblivious, and everyone ends up losing some well deserved quality time.
Use All Your Tools
Business is like a battlefield for management staff inside company operations these days.
Most companies are struggling to predict the future and are making inadequate decisions
because of the lack of good ideas, yet they spend millions of dollars in training programs
and teaching new employees annually. Firms should learn the art of “Benchmarking”
(Williams.pg334). Adapting good traits that other big firms like Microsoft and Sony are
implementing in their planning style and human resource management. The problem is,
most companies operate under the assumption that if they hire an employee for an entry
level job requirement that needs no experience, that employee is just as blank as a brand
new computer hard drive that needs to be programmed and brought up to speed on the
way they are supposed to run the computer with its operating system. But a lot of
screening and interviewing has been spent looking for the best and most intelligent
candidates that they can find. Surely they have to be worth more than just being a blank
trainee. After going through all this trouble, they train them to do exactly what they need.
After training, the company sends them down to the back office to sort out papers and
make coffee as their extra job. This is a prime example of failure to utilize all their
resources.
A good illustration is FedEx ‘s Mr. Smith. In 1965, Yale University undergraduate
Fredrick W. Smith wrote a term paper about the passenger route systems used by most
airfreight shippers, which he viewed as economically inadequate. Smith wrote of the need
for shippers to have a system designed specifically for airfreight that could accommodate
time-sensitive shipments such as medicines, computer parts and electronics.
Though Mr. Smith got the grade C on his paper from his professor at Yale and no one
else was interested in his plans. Mr. Smith saw the potential in his own work and
managed to revolutionize the whole supply chain sector of our business operations, even
up to today some standards still apply. Mr. Smith worked at a warehouse at this time, one
that was currently encountering late delivery problems because of their supplier. This
shows us where companies can source some solutions to their problems and new
strategies that companies can start adapting in order to source more ideas that might be
beneficial to them. Mr. Smith had a solution on hand; one that could have saved his
boss’s business but no one ever asked him about his thoughts. If it is true that employees
are the most important assets for any business, then surely a lot of businesses are losing
valuable ideas that could take their companies to the next level. If this company had an
open platform to present ideas, then they would have at least had the chance to consider
Mr. Smith’s proposal and in turn maybe solved their problems.
Seize Every Opportunity

3. A lot of great companies are now hiring at career fairs in colleges and schools because
they now realize that sometimes experience is not what defines every employee but their
personalities and ambitions. Statistical studies have shown that students are more
enthusiastic and ambitious in their first five years after graduating. In the report by the
Conference Board called “Are They Really Ready To Work?” explains information
found in a study were “Employer respondents were asked, in general, how they rated the
preparation of recent graduates hired for entry-level jobs in their U.S. workplaces
(Overall Preparation). The majority of employer respondents rate Overall Preparation of
both two-year and four-year college graduates as “adequate” (70.1 percent and 64.5
percent, respectively) for the entry-level jobs they fill.”
Though it might sound really certain that companies always find what they are looking
for, some of these entry-level employees are just students who are looking for a
paycheck. But they are still sharp students full of innovative ideas that cannot be bought
anywhere in the world. A little invitation and a well organized mentorship program to
manage these new comers, and they will work hard to solve some problems.
The fact that the USA is a diversified country to the bone, people from all walks of life
come to study in the USA and eventually seek employment. These are the people that
Google, Yahoo and Facebook take advantage of, not technology. Technology was a part
of their business once but then everyone caught up. They needed to create a dominant
design that would become the new standard for technology (Williams), and using their
wayward ideas to their competitive advantage (Williams), in a globally networked world
where everyone starts at the same level they have thrived. They learned that technology is
just a constant in the equation of what the future is going to be. Now if it is a constant, it
means it is never going away. It can be replaced at its discontinuity phase according to
the S-curve pattern of innovation but it will be better and more effective (Williams). And
if the company’s sole existence is not about improving technology then they should not
worry about what the next new gadget is going to be because it is beyond their control.
All companies have to do is avoid technological lockouts and be always ready to pick the
most effective technology out there for their business, exploiting it and then spend more
time focusing on the variables. These happen to be all the different individuals they have
employed in their companies.
A Dollar For Two
These steps are part of managing the sources of innovation during the strategic planning
process. If companies manage their human resources well enough, then there will be less
workers milking the companies and more ideas that lead to good strategic planning. It is
time to practice the statement that says a cooperation can think just as good as an
individual can, that means companies need to have more people thinking about the future.
Spend a little more money managing and experimenting with those ideas.
Workers with clear goals to achieve are easier to manage than the ones who don’t.
Companies have set their goals but have failed to share the responsibility of planning and
the thinking process with the lower levels of their work force. This is no longer a time to
divide and limit the potential of what people can do. Every dollar spent should be earned

4. back with a profit. If a CEO has his frontline employees thinking about how to improve
his company whilst having their dinner or taking a shower then everyone is doing their
job correctly. As long as we are looking in to the future then managing people’s ideas is
the new strategic planning.

5. References
Conerly, B. (2014, March 25). The Death of Strategic Planning: What Next? Retrieved
October 19, 2014.
Cavarnagh, R., Kay, K., Klein, D., & Meisinger, S. (2006). Two year to four-year
undergraduate students. Are They Really Ready To Work?, 1, 14-14.
Swanson, J. (2013, August 14). History of FedEx Operating Companies. Retrieved
October 19, 2014.
Williams, C. (2014). 5,6,7,8. In Mgmt 7 principles of management. with coursemate
printed access card (7th ed., pp. 75-95). S.l.: Cengage Learning.