ASSIGNMENT 4A-2

Assignment 4a-2

Assignment 4a-2

Campbell, A. & Alexander, M. (1997) 'What's Wrong with Strategy?' Harvard Business Review; Nov/Dec97, Vol. 75 Issue 6.

The above mentioned article is chosen for the annotated bibliography. The topic of the article is “What's wrong with Strategy”, written by Campbell et al. The main focus of the article is the problem that lies within the strategic planning in a business. Poor strategic planning may affect the business environment in the rapidly changing world, and may create various issues that may cause serious consequences for businesses. The article describes some of these issues that may occur during the phase of strategic planning and the importance of performance goals. The article also offers a systematic method to create performance measures to follow the plan, various features, and the process of implementing the plan.

Analytical Summary

The chosen article is relevant to the extent that it describes the significant issues that a company may face while implementing strategic planning in the business. Therefore, it is important to understand the significance of issues, and how these can be solved, which are discussed below.

Campbell et al. has discussed various issues in the article, which occur in the strategic planning phase. Explaining purpose, discovering insights, and combining the two into a strategy are not an easy task. All of the three steps are difficult that is why the puzzle of strategy formulation does not get solved easily. However, the puzzle becomes more difficult and complex when managers fail to distinguish between the purpose and constraint, when managers put goals before strategy and strategy before tactics, when they design structures planning process with timetables, which do not allow them to discover new insights. If managers define purpose and strategy differently, then they have a better chance of progressing toward the winning strategy they all ...