Strategic Planning in Entrepreneurial Companies: International Experiences

Introduction1

Every man, every company and every country should have a plan. Old wisdom says that companies which fail to plan, actually plan their own failure. In other words, planning the future means planning success. Strategic planning has received tremendous attention from both practitioners and academics, as business environment has become more competitive and more dynamic. The new competitive landscape, painted by the permanent technological changes and significant globalization trends, is moving towards hypercompetition², extreme emphasis on price, quality and customer satisfaction, and innovation activities, both in technology and new products/services. In this new competitive landscape, companies exist in highly turbulent and chaotic environments that produce disorder, disequilibrium and substantive uncertainty (Hitt, Keats, & DeMarie, 1998). Panta rhei! We are all familiar with the modern-day managers’ mantra that we live in times of great and constant change. Because the world is turbulent, it is said, and the competition is hyperturbulent, managers must take seriously the continually initiating and adjusting to change. Change, by definition, is good. Resistance to change is bad (Huy & Mintzberg, 2003, p. 79). From history, we can learn that only thing which is constant and certain is change. The environmental changes did not allow business inertia and short-term vision trap. They punished every effort toward past performance and useless business action which do not take consideration about future competitive position. Metaphorically, companies with short-term goal, objectives and myopic strategies are like hunter who was chasing a rabbit, but drove the wolf. Therefore, strategy-making is one of the most critical activities in times of change and in unfamiliar environments (Gavetti, Levinthal, & Rivkin, 2005). Propensity to change in the business environment is critical for every company. That is a to be, or not to be question. In thinking about the future, strategic planning helps to avoid time traps and to exploit changes in environment. Hence, it should not be surprising that many empirical studies find that lots of companies extensively use strategic planning (Rigby & Bilodeau, 2013).