Creating the Corporate Future

Here is a breakthrough book that delineates ideas and methods managers will need to plan for the uncertain environment corporations face in the future. Russell Ackoff is an original and provocative thinker. In previous books—A Concept of Corporate Planning (1970), Redesigning the Future (1974), and The Art of Problem Solving (1978)—he set forth innovative approaches to corporate planning that have been widely adopted. In Creating the Corporate Future Ackoff continues to give the business community original and major new challenging ideas that will enable corporate managers to re-think ways and means to plan for the future. Taking into account the pressing environmental and economic dilemmas we face, Ackoff presents a new, highly participative systems approach to planning, interactive planning. He not only develops its philosophical, conceptual, and theoretical foundations… he translates these into practical procedures. Interactive planning provides opportunities for individual and corporate development by synthesizing operational, tactical, and strategic planning into the design of a desirable future and the inventions of ways of realizing it. You get concrete guidance on these phases of interactive planning: —how to formulate the system of problems and opportunities that face a corporation —how to formulate goals, objectives, and ideals and select and evaluate the means by which they should be pursued —determining what resources will be required and how they should be acquired or developed —implementation and control of the planning decisions and the planning process itself. At once practical and provocative, Creating the Corporate Future is the result of many years of experience in all aspects of corporate planning. It belongs on the shelf of every manager or beginning manager who wants to get a head start on planning for the corporate future.