Business Planning Author:Bill Richardson As a strategy for maintaining its own existence and for satisfying the needs of people, an organization seeks to create wealth through interactions with its environments. It is the job of the management strategist to make sure that his or her organization is, in totality, an effective planning system. The theory of management strategy has develo... more »ped to help the management strategist to do his or her job more effectively. As a body of theory it contains concepts, frameworks and techniques to help these top decision makers plan and create organizations as effective planning/decision making/acting systems. In this book the authors aim to provide a complete planning model for an organization. This model identifies a range of interactive, critical planning problems and infers that greater organizational success is to be had through a proactive and systematic approach to their resolutions. The model also provides a framework for considering the organization as a complete planning system performing a range of planning activities which determine how successfuly the organization adapts to its environments as they are created. Prescriptions, models and other aids from the theory of management strategy are introduced as the book progresses through its exploration of each subsystem of the complete planning system. Introduced, too, are case studies, exercises and points for discussion. Together, these constituents offer business practitioners and students the opportunity to think through - and to practise - how they might improve organizational performance in critical problem areas. The book is accompanied by a volume of case materials, "Case Studies in Business Planning" and while "Business Planning" is intended to be a "complete" workbook and text in itself, this associated work is recommended as a complementary text. It is suitable for second year undergraduates on business studies courses in universities and polytechnics, HNC/D Business and Finance courses and DMS/CMS management courses.« less