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A key to the effective implementation of strategic plans is the communication of the strategic plans to executives in functional areas. A study of eighteen organizations revealed that their functional executives’ knowledge of the strategic plan was closely tied to their corporate planners’ assessment of the quality of the communication of the plan. In contrast, the functional executives’ knowledge was not so closely tied to the planners’ assessment of merely the quality of the business plan itself.Different organizations use different communication tactics. These tactics suggest practical actions to enable strategic planners to improve the communication of their plans.

A recent study reveals ways for planners to better communicate their strategies and improve the probability of successfully implementing them. Planners who worked for manufacturing firms were interviewed during the study and suggested the following practical actions:

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

Questions whether, in the USA, faith‐based communities can have an important effect on politics. Contends that other areas, where there are poorer communities, are more likely to be influenced politically in civil society although does not preclude other income sectors from being similarly affected just that deprived areas are more likely to listen to faith‐based organizers.

The task of changing the organizational climate of a school is only one tiny example of the fundamental issue of permanence and change. This example can only be understood in the light of a broad social and intellectual matrix. Two prime questions are: Under what conditions can the organizational climate be changed? If it can be changed, what approach is most appropriate? There is a great deal that is not known about organizational climate. Research is needed into the development of norms, the control of variables in experimental situations, the effects of size and “human density” and the influence of bureaucracy. Though we may be anxious to change organizational climate, one thing is clear—social change takes place slowly. To force its growth “out of phase” is to invite unanticipated social consequences. If the nature of social change is to be understood the planners, scientists, technologists need to maintain dialogue with each other. We must create in our society an “open” organizational climate that encourages the human dialogue.