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This article argues that existing research poorly specifies the link between planning and performance because of omitted variable bias. Researchers agree planning is a critical part of creating any new venture. Many researchers assess planning by whether a small firm has a written business plan. Unfortunately, efforts empirically to validate this relationship have been inconclusive. This article proposes that researchers should assess business plans both on the quality of the plan (and the planning process that produced it), and on the quality of the underlying business opportunity. Failure to account for both aspects of a business plan amounts to omitted variable bias, frustrating attempts to accurately estimate the true relationship.

The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between two different sets of practices, lean startup and business planning, and their relation to entrepreneurial performance.

The authors collected data from 120 entrepreneurs across the US about a variety of new venture formation activities within the categories of lean startup or business planning. They use hierarchical regression to examine the relationship between these activities and new venture performance using both a subjective and objective measure of performance.

The results show that talking to customers, collecting preorders and pivoting based on customer feedback are lean startup activities correlated with performance; writing a business plan is the sole business planning activity correlated with performance.

This research lays the foundation for understanding the components of both lean startup and business planning. Moreover, these results demonstrate that the separation of lean startup and business planning represents a false dichotomy.

These findings suggest that entrepreneurs should engage in some lean startup activities and still write a business plan.

This article offers the first quantitative, empirical comparison of lean startup activities and business planning. Furthermore, it provides support for the relationship between specific lean startup activities and firm performance.

Against the theoretical backdrop of the embeddedness and the resilience literatures, this paper investigates if and how SMEs' planning for adversity affects firms' performance.

The paper develops hypotheses that investigate the link between the risk management of immigrant-led and native-led SMEs and their performance and draw on novel data from a survey on 900 immigrant- and 2,416 native-led SMEs in 5 European cities to test them.

Immigrant-led SMEs are less likely to implement an adversity plan, especially when they are in an enclave sector. However, adversity planning is important to enhance the growth of immigrant-led businesses, even outside a crisis period, and it reduces the performance gap vis-à-vis native-led businesses. Inversely, the positive association between adversity planning and growth in the sample of native entrepreneurs is mainly driven by entrepreneurs who have experienced a severe crisis in the past.

This paper empirically uses planning for adversity as an anticipation stage of organizational resilience and tests it in the context of immigrant and native-led SMEs. Results support the theoretical reasoning that regularly scanning for threats and seeking information beyond the local community equips immigrant-led SMEs with a broader structural network which translates into new organizational capabilities. Furthermore, results contribute to the process-based view of resilience demonstrating that regularly planning for adversity builds a firm's resilience potential, though the effect is contingent on the nationality of the leaders.

The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive.

Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages.

The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms.

In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas.

Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.

This study explores how and when intuitive forms of planning can be used in a family firm's succession process.

The study uses an extended focus group meeting, consisting of individual, group and subgroup discussions with seven highly experienced external family business advisors in the Netherlands to gain a holistic understanding of the succession process and its underlying logic. The study also employs pre- and post-group questionnaires.

This study reveals that advisors perceive intuitive forms of planning as an integral part of the succession process, with the latter containing both intuitive and formal logic and activities. Both logics are used situationally and flexibly to deal with the uniqueness and unpredictability of the succession process and to build strong relations and manage relational dynamics in business families to address tasks, dilemmas and contingencies.

The succession process is an important part of business families' achievement of transgenerational intent. Creating commitment among potential successors begins when they are children, and understanding the role of the more intuitive forms of planning during the succession process will provide us with a more holistic perspective on its dynamics.

This study demonstrates how artificial intelligence (AI) shapes the strategic planning process in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business environments. Having adopted various domains of the Cynefin framework, the research explores AI's transformative potential and provide insights regarding how organisations can harness AI-driven solutions for strategic planning.

This conceptual paper theorises the role of AI in strategic planning process in a VUCA world by integrating extant knowledge across multiple literature streams. The “model paper” approach was adopted to provide a theoretical framework predicting relationships among considered concepts.

The paper highlights potential application of the Cynefin framework to manage complexities in strategic decision-making process, the transformative impact of AI at different stages of strategic planning, the required strategic planning characteristics within VUCA to be supported by AI and the attendant challenges posed by AI integration in the uncertain business landscape.

This study pioneers a theoretical exploration of AI's role in strategic planning within the VUCA business landscape, guided by the Cynefin framework. Thus, it enriches scholarly discourse and expands knowledge frontiers.

Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour, this research aims to investigate systemically if and how incumbents and successors share attitudes, social norms and perception of the feasibility of their business succession.

Qualitative research carried out on a group of small Italian family firms (N = 10).

This study provides evidence of background mechanisms (attitudes, social norms and perception of feasibility) affecting the implementation of business succession planning in family SMEs. Moreover, this study provides further evidence supporting the role of social norms in strategic decision-making processes within family firms.

Findings from this study contribute to current literature in multiple ways and have several research implications.

This study highlights that it is more appropriate to adopt a systemic rather than an individualistic approach in investigating/managing business succession.

Family firms are the most widespread type of firms in the world; thus, a systematic failure in business transmission represents a prominent socioeconomical problem for policy-makers and institutions.

This study leads to further developments in exploring business succession from a psychological point of view. Findings also highlight the limits of how a theory applied in order to predict individual behaviour can provide insight into collective behaviour involving a family.

Modern academic links between leadership and strategy were forged in the early 1960s with the heightened application of strategy to business planning. These links were soon dissolved by the strategy consultants who came to dominate the field of business strategy in the mid-1960s. The consultants dismissed the role of leadership in strategic planning in favor of objective analyses of the external environment that eliminated any need for leadership skills, judgment, values, or intuition. Failures to implement strategy in the 1980s led to limited roles for leaders in implementing strategies they had no role in creating, but the gulf between leadership and strategy has steadily widened.

This paper traces the consequences of this widening gulf for teaching leadership and strategy in the classroom. It explores how an integrated approach to teaching leadership and strategy would better prepare today’s students for the challenges they will face as future business leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between organizational performance and the pattern of strategic decisions formalized in the planning of a Brazilian heavy construction company between 2006 and 2014. In this period, the company experienced a recurrent pattern of maintaining strategic decisions, despite the systematic decrease in performance and investments in the formal strategic planning (SP) and monitoring of results. The research focus is on strategic inertia and the influence of social determinants on the relationship between performance and the strategic actions negotiated in formal planning.

This is a single-case study. The exploratory-descriptive research comprises data collection on performance and strategic decisions from the period between 2006 and 2014. The analysis was guided through documentary material and data collected from 16 interviews conducted with members of the middle to top management concerning performance, goals, and strategic initiatives. The interviewees’ statements were used to apprehend the interpreted dimension of SP expressed in the meanings attributed to this process. The analysis adopts a sociological base, and strategic inertia is the underlying phenomenon that guides this analysis.

The results show the interactive effect caused by political, cognitive, discursive, and ceremonial mechanisms obstruct the company’s strategic decisions. This case study illustrates that the conditions for the phenomenon of path dependence were created, reinforcing the strategic inertia observed in the maintenance of a reproduced pattern of strategic initiatives and goals, even though the performance was recurrently unsatisfactory. In this case, strategic inertia showed a complex relationship between the interpreted performance and strategic actions negotiated in formal planning, conditioned by mechanisms of trajectory reinforcement that interfered with the conditions for strategic change.

Strategic inertia demonstrates a complex relationship between the interpreted performance and strategic actions negotiated in formal planning, conditioned by mechanisms of trajectory reinforcement that interfere with the conditions for strategic change. Future research on social mechanisms from the perspective of strategy-as-practice could be developed to capture the tacit components, language, power games, and other relevant categories in the social interaction of strategy development at the organizational level. In addition, future research could focus on investigating the extent to which path dependence is contingent, assuming that it is a temporary and, therefore, reversible process.

This work contributes to the view of SP from the social perspective and shows that the relationship between performance and strategy has biases that can compromise performance. The work highlights implications for maintaining strategic initiative patterns, which shape a path whose function is less associated with its effects on performance and more associated with the commitment to instrumental results, due to the social nature of organizations.

This work deals with social mechanisms that influence strategic decisions. Since organizational performance depends on strategic decisions, the social nature of strategic inertia has causal implications to economic and social impact of organizations.

This work argues in favor of the influence of self-reinforcing mechanisms of path dependence in the relationship between performance and strategic decisions. The results extended the predominantly structural approach of path dependence by considering interpretive aspects related to the political, discursive, cognitive, and ceremonial dimensions of strategic inertia.