Influence of strategic planning in all areas of life
Planning is an art that is present in all areas of life, either on a personal or business level because it is importantYou can not pass. In addition, each planning conforms to what as a person or company wants to achieve in time. To understand more about strategic planning, it is important to know what each of the terms that compose it consists of. Next, there will be definitions according to several authors.
According to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) 1: Planning is understood as all “general plan, methodically organized and frequently of great breadth, to obtain a specific objective” and as a strategy “traces to direct an issue” 2, in other words,strategy is a set of actions that are carried out to achieve a specific purpose.
According to Mintzberg and Water*: Strategic planning is nothing more than the process of relating the goals of an organization, determining the necessary policies and programs to achieve specific objectives on the way to these goals and establish the necessary methods to ensure that policies andprograms are executed, that is, it is a formulated long -term planning process that is used to define and achieve organizational goals.
In that sense, strategic planning is a process through which a company after establishing its objectives, chooses the actions it will carry out to achieve the proposed objectives. At present, strategic planning has great importance at the business level because it can be used to manage all the resources with which an organization has to align them to the goals and/or objectives set out of the same. Also, it allows companies to aspire to grow as time goes by, wanting to be more profitable and competitive in the market.
However, when applying everything related to strategic planning in a company, some of its benefits can be highlighted: first, it allows the entire work team to have a sense of direction, that is, everyone will work to fulfill the same purpose and increase thejob satisfaction, since as everyone is working together to meet common objectives, the attitude they would work with would be better because it would help workers feel important to contribute to the fulfillment of the organization’s goals. Second, decision making, it is considered a benefit because having a panorama on how a company looks in the future this would allow it to make decisions that favor the company, that is, the decisions would be aligned to the objectives. Third, identification of opportunities and problem solving in a strategic way, with this you can give a competitive advantage in the management of the organization because having teamwork, ideas can be integrated, which provide an innovative solution that allows to be a differentiatorbefore the other organizations. And finally, having all workers in one direction can align the mission (it is the reason for being of a company), vision (it is how the company looks in a few years) and values of the company (the principlesethics of the company) with the aim of obtaining greater productivity and commitment of the work team.
Strategic planning influences the growth of every company because this is key to its growth, that is, because it helps companies to see and find opportunities, to consolidate their strengths, to consider as the center of the company acustomers and this improving competitiveness. As mentioned above, the lack of vision either in the medium or long term is a risk that no company should run because if there are no clear goals, something valuable will be lost that does not recover, which is time and resources. And as a famous phrase says "time is gold", every minute that is wasted with objectives that are not clear can lead to any way or another to a company to failure.
In conclusion, it can be concluded that having a good strategic planning helps the growth of a company because it allows it to set goals and create the actions that must be followed for the fulfillment of those objectives. In addition, it helps companies to vision, increase the competitive advantage, allows the profitability and productivity of a company to increase, and it helps to work as a team for carrying out the organization.
On the other hand, there is a phrase that I like a lot and which I consider very successful in this case that there is talk of strategic planning;It is the following: "If you don’t know where your ship is heading, no wind will be favorable" (Seneca). In a nutshell, what it means is that if our objectives are personal or the objectives of a company are not defined or are not clear, it is very difficult to know what we want to achieve and the right path we must take to meet those objectives. Even if a light path is taken, you can make the mistake that all the effort made is in vain or counterproductive for what you really want and end up failing for not doing things right and not defining our goals.
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