STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Assignment – 1

Under what circumstances do strategic plans fail?

There are many reasons why strategic plans fail, especially:

• Failure to follow the plan

- No follow through after initial planning

- No tracking of progress against plan

- No consequences for above

• Failure to manage change

- Inadequate understanding of the internal resistance to change

- Lack of vision on the relationships between processes, technology and organization

• Under-estimation of time requirements

- No critical path analysis done

• Poor communications

- Insufficient information sharing among stakeholders

- Exclusion of stakeholders and delegates

• Inability to predict environmental reaction

- What will competitors do

- Fighting brands

- Price wars

- Will government intervene

• Over-estimation of resource competence

- Can the staff, equipment, and processes handle the new strategy

- Failure to develop new employee and management skills

• Failure to coordinate

- Reporting and control relationships not adequate

- Organizational structure not flexible enough

• Failure to obtain senior management commitment

- Failure to get management involved right from the start

- Failure to obtain sufficient company resources to accomplish task

• Failure to obtain employee commitment

- New strategy not well explained to employees

- No incentives given to workers to embrace the new strategy

• Failure to understand the customer

- Why do they buy

- Is there a real need for the product

- Inadequate or incorrect marketing research

More reasons why strategic plans fail

• Internal focus vs balanced external /internal focus

• Focus on mechanical and rational strategic planning & goal-setting vs
strategic thinking (the overt emphasis on the lateral cognitive skills and operations
to generate new ideas and concepts around tactics and strategy)
• Straight-line forecasts vs scenarios
• Clarity between certainty vs uncertainty
• Challenging assumptions ; what do we take for granted
• Challenging “what works”
• Ignoring changing circumstances and time scales
• Ignoring dissenting opinions
• Dismissing outlying nonconforming information (problem of scope and
definitions)
• Ignoring ambiguity ( lack of any framework)
• Mishandling uncertainty ( lack of data or even which questions to ask to find the
information),
• Poor sense-making , sense-modeling and sense-portraying (Sense-making occurs
when we consciously or unconsciously compare new knowledge with our existing
mindset-assumptions, norms and values and see what's changed, challenged,
dismissed or reinforced
• Not building in flexibility and adaptability into your strategic plans, i.e. if
circumstance or condition A changes, then we go with Tactic B
• Urgent vs important; deflected from the task by the supposed urgent issues of the
day

MANISHREE GUPTA
MBA IVA
00815903909