Chapter 2. The Process Creating a Strategic Plan

Creating an organization's future is an awesome responsibility. I don't remember anyone ever mentioning this when I first studied leadership. We all spoke of the leader's responsibility to accomplish the organization's mission. The future of the organization was just assumed. This is probably true for all of us, regardless of where we first saw leadership practiced. But had you stopped to think about it, which you probably didn't, you would have known this was not automatically true.

We have all seen many organizations stumble, fall, and fail even though they had looked invincible in the recent past. In just about every case, the natural assumption is that this is a result of the tactical decisions made by the organization's leader, helped along perhaps by economic conditions. In some cases, this is true. However, a look at both successful and failed organizations indicates that the seeds of their current state were sown years before, sometimes by leaders long gone.

Drucker's insight that what the organization would become depended greatly on the present leader's actions was revolutionary. It is little wonder that to Drucker determining what an organization was to become was any leader's prime task. How difficult is this prime task? Not too difficult if a leader has a methodology. In addition to advice, Drucker had a methodology in mind—strategic planning, but not as many organizations practice it.