In this column, I will discuss the principles involved in getting strategic plans implemented and what the professional planner's role should be vis‐a‐vis these principles. I will also give examples of how these principles are applied in practice. My comments will apply especially to decentralized multibusiness companies; but the principles should be generally applicable.

Technology, particularly when defined broadly as “know‐how,” is the raison d'être of most businesses. The customer is willing to pay the vendor who knows how to produce a product or service that the customer is either unable or unwilling to produce himself.

Frequently, when a company undertakes strategic planning it discovers that it is not optimally organized to carry out strategic management. A rapid and wholesale reorganization of the company along the lines indicated by the strategic planning activity is likely to cause more harm than good, resulting in the company's going down the tubes operationally while getting geared up to carry out good strategy. Thus, one of the arts of management relies upon the CEO's judgment on the speed and timing of the conversion to the optimum strategic organization; but a good strategic plan gives the CEO a blueprint as a reference point and an aid to helping the objectivity and consistency of those timing judgments.

In the design and operation of strategic planning systems, it is assumed that the people involved have a financial incentive to make good plans and then to see that those plans are well implemented. The traditional financial incentive used to motivate managers' behaviors in the desired direction is the so‐called incentive compensation or annual bonus. Thus, when strategic planning systems are broadened to explicitly take this factor into account, they become strategic management systems.