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Building the strategic plan
Book Reviews
There can be no better recommendation than thls for reading his thought-provoking bo:)k.
P.R. A TTWOOD Emdhoven Unwersity of Technology Emdhoven, Netherlands
Stephanie K. MARRUS
Building the Strategic Plan Wiley, Chichester, 1984, xiv 4 342 pages, £26.55 Whoever wrote the copy for the inside front dust cover deserves great credit, for it clearly and accurately states the book's purpose and content, as follows. "Ask any manager about planning, and you'll hear something like, "Yes, we do it. And, yes, we could be doing a much better job of it." Or even, "Yes, we do it, but I'm not really clear on what it is we're supposed to be doing". Which is why many managers who could be doing &eir own strategic, market, or financial planning rely instead on expensive consultants. This book presents the practical alternative. It is a book for the practitmner, not the theoretician. It is written specifically for the business professmnal who has a major planning job to do and needs some help in a d~scipline rife with jargon, theory, and mystique. The author, now director of market planning for a major high-technology company was formerly a consultant at Arthur D. Little inc., the Bostonbased consulting firm. In this how-to-do-xt guide, Stephanie Marrus shows you how to put these techniques to work for your company. She explains exactly what all the elements of a plan are, what information it should contain, and how to present this information effectively, using sophisticated yet easy-to-apply graphic presentation techniques. Using an ongoing study of the strategic, market, and financial position of a real company in the publishing industly (disguised for this book, but using real data), Marrus shows you: - How to develop a strategic plan, step by step. - Where and how to gather data. - How to use powerful new graphic techniques to
275
visualize key market or" fi aancial relationships. - How to use this graphic presentation to analyze your business, your competition, or the entire industry. For the manager who is not a professmnal planner but is charged w,th the responsibihty to produce a strategic plan.,.lor the executive wishing to better understand what all those high-priced consultants are doing with the company's money...for the student or planner wishing to gain a new perspective on the data or to learn an innovative set of graphic techniques, Building The Strategic Plan represents a valuable source of mformation - one that can help you plan better, more easily, and at a much lower cost." The book's level can be judged by the fact that the use of logarithmic paper is explained at great length in the most simple terms. Therein he several apparent paradoxes. Will any such non-numerate manager wish to carry out the proposed analyses himself?. Either he will have access to specmlist assistance or his company's level of sophistication will make the exercise a waste of t~me. Moreover, it seems likely that compames without the specialist assistance will possess either the required data or the means of collecting it. Inclder.talty, the European reader will find the chapters oe data acqmsitlon to be too oriented to the United States. The operational researcher will probably want to sk,m through the pag,'s in the bookshop. Then he will w~sh to ask some of the senior executlve~ m Ins company, whether they have read ~t Hopefully several will have their corporate appetites whetted, and embark on a joint venture. Operational research would thus benefit greatly by recovenng some lost ground.
Alan MERCER UnwerstO" of Lancaswr Lancaster, Umted Kingdom Victor BIGNELLo Geoff PEIFERS and Christopher PYM
Catastrophic Failures The Open University Press, Milton Keynes. 1978, 273 pages
There can be no better recommendation than thls for reading his thought-provoking bo:)k.
P.R. A TTWOOD Emdhoven Unwersity of Technology Emdhoven, Netherlands
Stephanie K. MARRUS
Building the Strategic Plan Wiley, Chichester, 1984, xiv 4 342 pages, £26.55 Whoever wrote the copy for the inside front dust cover deserves great credit, for it clearly and accurately states the book's purpose and content, as follows. "Ask any manager about planning, and you'll hear something like, "Yes, we do it. And, yes, we could be doing a much better job of it." Or even, "Yes, we do it, but I'm not really clear on what it is we're supposed to be doing". Which is why many managers who could be doing &eir own strategic, market, or financial planning rely instead on expensive consultants. This book presents the practical alternative. It is a book for the practitmner, not the theoretician. It is written specifically for the business professmnal who has a major planning job to do and needs some help in a d~scipline rife with jargon, theory, and mystique. The author, now director of market planning for a major high-technology company was formerly a consultant at Arthur D. Little inc., the Bostonbased consulting firm. In this how-to-do-xt guide, Stephanie Marrus shows you how to put these techniques to work for your company. She explains exactly what all the elements of a plan are, what information it should contain, and how to present this information effectively, using sophisticated yet easy-to-apply graphic presentation techniques. Using an ongoing study of the strategic, market, and financial position of a real company in the publishing industly (disguised for this book, but using real data), Marrus shows you: - How to develop a strategic plan, step by step. - Where and how to gather data. - How to use powerful new graphic techniques to
275
visualize key market or" fi aancial relationships. - How to use this graphic presentation to analyze your business, your competition, or the entire industry. For the manager who is not a professmnal planner but is charged w,th the responsibihty to produce a strategic plan.,.lor the executive wishing to better understand what all those high-priced consultants are doing with the company's money...for the student or planner wishing to gain a new perspective on the data or to learn an innovative set of graphic techniques, Building The Strategic Plan represents a valuable source of mformation - one that can help you plan better, more easily, and at a much lower cost." The book's level can be judged by the fact that the use of logarithmic paper is explained at great length in the most simple terms. Therein he several apparent paradoxes. Will any such non-numerate manager wish to carry out the proposed analyses himself?. Either he will have access to specmlist assistance or his company's level of sophistication will make the exercise a waste of t~me. Moreover, it seems likely that compames without the specialist assistance will possess either the required data or the means of collecting it. Inclder.talty, the European reader will find the chapters oe data acqmsitlon to be too oriented to the United States. The operational researcher will probably want to sk,m through the pag,'s in the bookshop. Then he will w~sh to ask some of the senior executlve~ m Ins company, whether they have read ~t Hopefully several will have their corporate appetites whetted, and embark on a joint venture. Operational research would thus benefit greatly by recovenng some lost ground.
Alan MERCER UnwerstO" of Lancaswr Lancaster, Umted Kingdom Victor BIGNELLo Geoff PEIFERS and Christopher PYM
Catastrophic Failures The Open University Press, Milton Keynes. 1978, 273 pages