Showing papers in "Long Range Planning in 1976"

TL;DR: In the face of continuing economic and environmental uncertainty, an increasing number of companies are rejecting traditional approaches to long range planning as mentioned in this paper, and there is considerable confusion concerning what should take their place.

TL;DR: Argenti as mentioned in this paper describes what he found during a year's investigation into company failure that he undertook for a recently published book "Corporate Collapse" and reveals that "defective response to change" is one of the prime causes of failure in mature companies.

TL;DR: In this article, an investigation into the practice of corporate planning in 20 major Dutch companies was carried out and the results emphazise some of the problems regarding the corporate planner and his role in the firm.

TL;DR: The idea of central control systems has its origins in systems thinking and cybernetics, which suggests that management should have a comprehensive planning end information system covering the total enterprise as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: The most prevalent event associated with perception of a need for more formalized planning was a change in top management in a large-scale corporation as discussed by the authors, which is the most common cause of organizational change.

TL;DR: The political environment and organizational complexity of public decision making render conventional approaches to objective, rational, comprehensive planning of limited value in government agencies and in private corporations involved in public policy making.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that when market researchers and managers are faced with two or more forecasts of the same event, the typical approach is to attempt to determine which is better (or best).

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that if corporate simulation models are going to help management meet their objectives then changes are necessary and that these changes require that the models should be more user oriented, more emphasis on production modelling, there will be an increased use of optimization techniques linked to corporate models, and more effort to integrate finance, marketing and production.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the traditional dichotomy of social and physical dimensions of environmental management must be done away with, and that the rapidly evolving concept of policy planning can provide the mechanisms to deal with the problem of management in this area.

TL;DR: The Inverted Product Life Cycle (IPL) framework as discussed by the authors is a new framework and new perspectives for viewing and considering alternative growth opportunities, which takes a concept with which most managers are familiar and expands it into an analytical yet intuitive and useful tool for planning future growth.

TL;DR: A comparative study of U.S.A. and Japan on long-range planning is presented in this paper, where the authors conclude that American corporations follow-up more closely and long range planning is used for the evaluation of managers of divisions.

TL;DR: A review of the current thinking and practice on corporate development can be found in this article, where the authors argue that organizations evolve in a sporadic way through the drive of an entrepreneur, in response to opportunities presented by new products and expanding markets, and to defend themselves against the threat of competition or government action.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors attempt to bring together some of the more important findings in the literature and recommend the development of simple models to aid the planning process rather than overall corporate models.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that fundamental changes in the multinational corporate environment are taking place raising proaches to multinational environmental surveillance and multinational strategic management and propose a framework to point to the need for greater environmental orientation and adaptation.

TL;DR: Cross-impact analysis is one of the methods developed inorder to improve human probability judgments of single and pairs of events and in order to deal explicitly with higher order interactions; in particular, cross-impact allows for the computation of the most probable combination of the events considered, or ‘most probable scenario’.

TL;DR: In this paper, the role of psychological variables in implementing planning models is explored, including resistance to planning activities and plans, motivation for improved performance against plans, cognitive limitations in implementing plans, and blocks to innovate planning.

TL;DR: A normative model for setting time horizons for planning is presented and simplifying assumptions which facilitate the mathematical solution of the problem are discussed and relaxed in order to show how realistic situations are illuminated by the model.

TL;DR: In this paper, the influence of computer methods on decision-making in British industry has been investigated based on information on the planning systems of a cross-section of British industry, and the authors illustrate how managers in these firms were coping with planning in the present conditions of extreme uncertainty about the future, combined with adverse economic and business conditions.

TL;DR: In this article, a systematic approach to strategic planning in universities is outlined, which represents an interesting case study of long range planning for non-profit making service institutions, an expanding sector of today's economy.

TL;DR: In this paper, a method for exploring future policy options is described with special emphasis on policy implications, and three energy policy options for the U.K. are described, together with the procedures for choosing the range of options and constructing the future scenarios.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the various steps in the strategic planning process, and relate them to a situation in which comprehensive long-range plans for a new health sciences library have been developed, and to a considerable degree, implemented.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze energy-GDP patterns over a long time on an individual country basis and to do so by defining GDP in terms of national currency, and the correlations obtained by the latter method are uniformly and extremely high enabling a planner who can forecast the GDP levels of a country with some confidence to derive energy consumption from an appropriate regression equation with almost a pinpoint precision.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report on the particular experience of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from the initiation of a new planning system in 1972 to 1975, and the lessons learned and conclusions drawn from this experience are described in the article, many of which will have relevance to public sector planning in other environments.

TL;DR: This paper summarizes the results of a preliminary examination of the three scenarios described there and referred to as ‘business-as-usual’, ‘technical-fix’ and ‘low-growth’ to establish the range of feasible options and the types of policies needed to accomplish them.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the models which have been put forward relating to the strategic planning process in multinational companies are inadequate and that the organizational structures and control systems adopted by companies have allowed them to cope to some degree, the advent of the regional headquarters having played a significant role in this process where inter-regional trading is limited.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the problems and opportunities associated with acquisitions and mergers and argue that despite the low level of activity in this area at the present time, growth oriented companies should be considering their related long-term objectives.

TL;DR: This paper discusses a framework which may be used in striving to achieve a reasonably accurate assessment of the order size of chemicals and steel plants during the post-war period.