نشریه سیاست نامه علم و فناوری
سال ششم شماره 1 (پیاپی 14، بهار 1395)

Professor Khalili Shoorini is one of the pioneers in strategic planning courses teaching in Iran and his translated book has been referred as the main reference book at Iranian universities for many years. In this release, a review on strategic planning filed of research and discussion about management realm is conducted through an interview. To this end, we met Professor Khalili in his office. He was so welcome and invited us to issue this article instead of publishing the conversation. We find the article sufficiently qualified to answer all our questions about professor’s point of view around management knowledge, strategic planning, and their general conditions in our society. We are so grateful to Professor Khalili to provide us with his comprehensive and precious article and publish it exactly as it is to hopefully meet the readers demand.

The common and conventional look at planning is assumed as the road map to move from status quo to desired status of organization. The document which is developed by advising team or planning department is examined and modified during execution and the feedback is drawn to reform the strategies. In this article, criticizing ideas to already mentioned procedure are investigated. Besides unconventional or insufficient look at planning is defined which is more consistent with companies reality. In this viewpoint, planning doesn’t have a special configuration. Planning bears specific features and develops according to contingencies. In fact, the document is dependent on subject and problem and contingently changes. In addition to documentation, planning is a set of activities to ensure that the plan will be practically implemented.

The early emerging idea of strategic planning is connected to its fundamental premise introduced in the 1960s in the United States: “strategy must be obtained through a logical structured process gradually and step-by-step”. In this article, we would review the historical infrastructures and fundamental premises of strategic planning based on the most referred book “The fall and rise of strategic planning” by Henry Mintzberg. Moreover, the consequences of strategic planning on organizations performance are surveyed to answer the question whether this knowledge has been successful to promote organizational performance and help them mutate and innovate.

The purpose of this article is to find compelling and appropriate answers to these questions: why don’t the plans meet a determined goal in our society? Why do many experts believe that the organizations do not have a plan or strategy despite the fact that various types of plans are developed for them? One must look for the answers of these strategic and challenging questions considering three factors: 1) misunderstanding and mistaking the meaning and planning procedures, 2) inconclusive plan codification, and 3) incomplete implementation of plans. In this article, each of these answers have been discussed exclusively considering the author’s experience and his corporation in executing planning projects of Iranian national gas research and information company.

When the strategic planning was first proposed in mid-1960s, it drew many companies and scientists’ attention. Nowadays many companies bear a specific strategy but a small number of them have accomplished strategies implementation efficiently. The question is what are the key success factors of companies connected to strategic planning and what avoids them to gain their optimal set. The gap in literature review of strategic planning issues is focused in this article and comprises the main research outlines discussed here. The article aims to detect key factors in strategic gap, prioritizing them, and finally to develop a framework including these factors. Field research correlational methods are applied in this research. Library resources helped us determine influencing key factors in strategic gap and TOPSIS is applied to select more important factors. Finally, exploratory factor analysis in SPSS software is adopted to categorize influencing factors on strategic gap. Four categories are defined as design, implementation, evaluation, background and strategic planning support.

Aligning business strategies and information technologies strategies is a concept which expresses the ideal and mutual relationship between activities and organizes business strategies on one hand and information technologies on the other hand to meet organizational goals. Therefore, in this paper the effects of aligning business strategies and information technologies on insurance companies’ success are evaluated and surveyed. In this study, the strategic alignment maturity in 19 active insurance company is measured based on Luftman model (2000). Also, considering existing statistics published by central insurance company of Islamic republic of Iran, key success factors of these companies are extracted as the market share, profitability, and returns on investment. The purpose of gathering and analysis of data is to answer this important question whether the alignment of business strategies and information technologies strategies has a desirable effect on insurance companies’ success. Results address the effects of different factors on alignment of business strategies and information technologies strategies and the effects of this strategic alignment on insurance companies’ success.

If the common models of “planning” are the failed solutions for countries to achieve evolutionary strategies (you can refer to other publications of this journal) then what should we do and what are the other solutions that policy makers should face? The article aims to answer these questions. The most principle ideas of this article are based on the popular and authoritative research of Rodrik (2008) which contains precise statistical proofs and reasoning. The research brings about a novel approach especially in the field of industrial strategy for policy makers in developing countries. Rodrik emphasizes that the main strategists in a country are the pioneer entrepreneurs of that country who develop new ways for moving from traditional performances to modern ones through learning, trial and error procedures which result in economic growth. In this regard, the policy makers’ main responsibility is not to develop complicated interference tools, but to create a collaborative network with other entrepreneurs to resolve the oncoming obstacles. Herein, we map the importance of strategic networks through case studies: Poland economic Ketchup; German chemical industry Ketchup; and the most modern technological developments in American Darpa.