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In the design and operation of strategic planning systems, it is assumed that the people involved have a financial incentive to make good plans and then to see that those plans are well implemented. The traditional financial incentive used to motivate managers' behaviors in the desired direction is the so‐called incentive compensation or annual bonus. Thus, when strategic planning systems are broadened to explicitly take this factor into account, they become strategic management systems.

In this column, I will discuss the principles involved in getting strategic plans implemented and what the professional planner's role should be vis‐a‐vis these principles. I will also give examples of how these principles are applied in practice. My comments will apply especially to decentralized multibusiness companies; but the principles should be generally applicable.

One of the purposes of effective strategic management is to create desirable change in the company.

Technology, particularly when defined broadly as “know‐how,” is the raison d'être of most businesses. The customer is willing to pay the vendor who knows how to produce a product or service that the customer is either unable or unwilling to produce himself.

Frequently, when a company undertakes strategic planning it discovers that it is not optimally organized to carry out strategic management. A rapid and wholesale reorganization of the company along the lines indicated by the strategic planning activity is likely to cause more harm than good, resulting in the company's going down the tubes operationally while getting geared up to carry out good strategy. Thus, one of the arts of management relies upon the CEO's judgment on the speed and timing of the conversion to the optimum strategic organization; but a good strategic plan gives the CEO a blueprint as a reference point and an aid to helping the objectivity and consistency of those timing judgments.

The notion of “decision support systems” (DSS) has entered the lexicon of strategic management in recent years. Practitioner‐oriented planning journals now carry numerous advertisements for commercially available “decision support systems.” The research literature has also begun to address the topic of strategic DSS (e.g.,[15, 24]).

The computer is an extremely valuable tool in strategic planning. But that is all it is—a tool. To borrow a phrase from Peter Drucker, it can make a planner's arm longer. The planner should view the computer as his slave—a sophisticated (and increasingly low‐cost) slave, but still a slave. The planner who finds himself the computer's slave is in deep trouble.

Like many midwestern companies that decades ago started business in industries now considered basic, Borg‐Warner currently has a number of strategic business units in mature industries.

Strategy has become one of the most overused and misused words in our business vocabulary. Chief executives love to talk about strategy because “it's the thing to do.” Managers love the word because it makes them sound more professional. Planners love “strategy” because it allows them to establish their own unique identity within the corporation. Which managers can stand before their subordinates, peers, or bosses and admit to not having a strategy?

Senior managers of industrial relations in large multi‐plant companies are faced by both centrifugal and centripetal forces and ask: “How can we achieve the benefits of decentralisation while at the same time maintaining centralised control?” In response to these countervailing pressures, senior managers create the appearance of autonomy for plant managers but in reality exercise centralised authority over major industrial relations decisions. To achieve this, managers at head office promote an ideology of decentralisation while actually practising central control. Local managers' autonomy on major industrial relations issues is largely a myth, perpetuated by formally decentralised management and bargaining structures, and techniques designed to enhance the independence of each plant. Central managers' authority is exercised by making all major decisions at head office and by co‐ordinating plant industrial relations through a variety of measures. Two factors are examined to explain this inconsistency between the levels of decision making over important issues and the level at which collective agreements are made—first, the changes in bargaining structure, and in particular the move towards single‐employer bargaining, and, second, developments in organisational structures and control techniques, especially those associated with divisionalised organisations.