Morrisey on Planning, a Guide to Strategic Thinking: Building Your Planning Foundation

This book is heavy on content. Mr. Morrisey has done all the culling for us. It's pricy, but worth the price if your time is valuable.

The ability to develop and build long-range strategic plans is as much art as science. But once you have your plan defined, the real trick is making it happen. Effective implementation of a plan is one of the toughest skills to master. Add in the need to both control and respond to uncertainty, and as the proverbial statement goes, "when you're up to your knees fighting alligators, it's easy to forget that you're goal was to drain the swamp". Well, Morrisey on Planning, Tactical Planning Guide provides an excellent framework that enables you to keep sight of the goal at all times. The charts and checklists serve as excellent examples, easy to modify to suit your business. Although the early chapters exhibit a stilted and somewhat simplistic writing style (call and response: for example, Who does the Planning? You, that's who!) the author has obviously thought out his presentation carefully, and does not bombard you with unnecessary comments, etc. If you really need to get that swamp drained, then this is the book for you!

It is a great task by itself to condense a subject as difficult as strategic planning into a book as thin and lean as George Morris' (100 pages). Yet, Morris Book is easily readable, and a clean, very systematic approach: I recommend it highly over any other Book on the market. It gives a real cooking-recipe with great checklists to put it into action. Style: Just do it. And the best of all: It is easily readable by non-MBA's (I have a Software engineer backround). I would recommend to get all 3 books in the series: A guide to tactical planning. The best thing I've come accross for a long time.