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When one thinks of making corporate choices and allocating resources, the process calls to mind a vision of a chief executive officer (CEO) who has been provided with a broad menu of business opportunities from which he can simply choose the most mouth‐watering and then supply the money and people required to pursue them. This picture is accurate as far as it goes. But it masks the many dilemmas the CEO must resolve before he can place his order.

Following a decade of economic turmoil, the climate for international business in the 1980s should be more favorable due to changes in the oil, currency, and labor markets. Those companies that recognize the growing trend toward globalization and position themselves to take advantage of it will emerge successful in the coming decade.

If corporate America's love affair with 1970s‐style strategic planning is not over, it is certainly on the rocks. Planning that relies on past experience, extrapolation, and incremental moves cannot meet today's challenges, such as unexpected competition, saturated markets, and changing technologies.

Few of the largest and most successful corporations have solved the problem of how to renew themselves when major shifts in the environment occur. What is needed is to “tamper with the main spring”; that is, a “big bang” innovation along with the institutional courage to pull it off.

There is no perfect model of strategic management which exists for all companies for all time, and top management should pick, from the shopping list of the last thirty years' thinking, the ideas which suit their time and situation.

Managers need neither swallow whole an elaborate strategic planning system, nor be discouraged into total rejection. Many of the problems businesses experience with strategic planning can be traced to a mismatch of their planning system and their companies' structure. This article presents a framework for conducting an audit of a company's structural need for strategic planning.

As a line manager immersed in the details of a specific product line or process, you may find yourself thrust into a planning role and asked to make strategic decisions. Unfortunately, years have slipped by since your college accounting and finance courses, and you find the jargon and data difficult to interpret. You're not alone. Studies show that most business students never mastered net present value analysis or managerial cost accounting. In addition, other studies find that graduates generally do not learn these concepts on the job since most line managers generally do not use them.

The 1960s saw the birth of corporate social responsibility. In the 1970s, companies focused on the management of social responsiveness. In the 1980s, corporations are grappling with the issue of making social responsibility a part of overall strategic management. The authors examine some of the ramifications of the search for a new definition of social responsibility.

Describes how corporations have recently decided that development of strategic planning information can be improved through the involvement of lower‐level line managers in their planning process. Proposes a practical method for organising middle‐level line managers in sequential order so as to plan efficiently. Discusses some behavioural implications are discussed.

Review and discussion of the book Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel III.

Opinion column.

“Strategy” has not been seen as something in which businesses must engage. The “Strategy revolution” Kiechel outlines arose in the 1960s with the new breed of consulting firm, had its heyday then and in the 1970s, and declined thereafter into something like incoherence and a focus on tactical, financial, and cost‐cutting approaches.

Reviews an important book and extracts some lessons about business strategy.