Foundations of Planning Flashcards
What’s planning?
Planning is the process of deciding the objectives or goals and getting the job done by establishing a strategy for achieving those objectives or goals. Planning sets the basis for all the other things managers do as they organize, lead and control.
What type of planning do you know?
Informal and formal. In informal planning very little is written down, while in formal planning specific objectives or goals are written down and shown to organization members.
Why do managers engage in planning?
To provide direction, set the standards to facilitate control, minimize waste and redundancy and reduce the impact of change.
Name the advantages and the disadvantages of formal planning.
Advantages: Establishes coordinated efforts, reduces uncertainty., reduces overlapping and wasteful activities and establishes the goals or standards thay facilitate managerial control.
Disadvantages: May create rigidity, formal plans cannot replace intuition and creativity, focuses managers’ attention on today’s competition, not on tomorrow’s survival, formal planning reinforces success, which may lead to failure.
What’s strategic management and what’s its importance?
Strategic management is what managers do to develop an organization’s strategies, it prepares managers to cope with changing situations, with continually changing situations and to examine relevant factors in planning future actions.
Name the six steps in strategic management process.
- Identify mission, goals and strategies
2/3. SWOT Analysis (Internal- Strengths, Weeknesses/External- Opportunities, Threats) - Formulate strategies
- Implement strategies
- Evaluate situation
What are the three important types of corporate strategies?
Growth strategy: when an organization expands the number of markets served or products offered, either through its current business or through new business.
Stability strategy: is characterized by an absense of significant changes, so the organization basically continues to do what it’s doing.
Renewal strategy: is for when an organization is in trouble and needs to address declining performance.
What other corporate strategies exist apart from the three principal ones?
Competitive strategy: a strategy for how an organization will compete in its main market.
Functional strategy: those strategies used by an organization’s vatious functional departments to support the competitive strategy.
What are the strategic weapons?
Customer service, employee skills & loyalty, innovation, quality, social media and big data.
What types of goals do you know?
Financial, Strategic, Stated, Real
Explain traditional goal setting.
In traditional goal setting, goals set by top managers flow down through the organization and become subgoals for each organizational area, so managers at each level define goals and apply their own interpertation as they make them more specific.
Explain MBO.
Management by Objectives is a process of setting mutually agree-upon goals and using those goals to evaluate employee performance, making sure employees are doing what they’re supposed to be doing and motivating them.
Name the six steps in goal setting
- Review the organization’s mission and employees’ key job tasks
- Evaluate available resources
- Determine the goals individually or with input from others
- Make sure goals are well-written and communicate to all who need to know them
- Build in feedback mechanisms to assess goal progress
- Link rewards to goal attainment
Plans that apply to the entire organization, establish the organization’s objectives and seek to position the organization in term of its environment.
Strategic Plans - Breadth of Use
Plans that specify the details of how to achieve the objectives.
Tactical Plans - Breadth of Use
