Strategic planning encourages, managers to take a holistic view of both the business and its environment. The importance of strategic planning is its ability to harness a series of objectives, strategies, policies and actions than can work together. Managing a company strategically means thinking and accordingly taking suitable action on multiple fronts. Due to involvement of multiple operations objectives, strategies, policies or actions may, on the surface, appear contradictory and mutually exclusive, but in reality they can work together.
Strategic planning provides the framework for all the major business decisions of an enterprise-decisions on business, products and markets, manufacturing facilities, investments and organizational structure. In a successful corporation, strategic planning works as the path finder to various business opportunities, simultaneously it also serves as a corporate defense mechanism helping the firm avoid costly mistakes in product market choices or investments.
Strategic planning has the ultimate burden of providing a corporation with certain core competencies and competitive advantages in its fight for survival and growth. It is not just a matter of projecting the future. It seeks to prepare the corporation to face the future. Its ultimate burden is influencing the corporation’s mega environs in its favor, working into the environs and shaping it instead of getting carried away by its turbulence or uncertainties. The success of the efforts and activities of the enterprise depends heavily on the quality of strategic planning i.e. the vision, insight, experience, quality of judgment and the perfection of methods and measures.