You are an executive for Oprah Enterprise and you are preparing a presentation for the executive staff or board of directors about the organization's direction.

1. Evaluate the planning function of management as it relates to the organization's goals and strategies. Use steps in the planning process.

• situational analysis

A process planners use, within time and resource constraints, to gather, interpret, and summarize all information relevant to the planning issue under consideration.

• Alternative Goals and Plans

Goals

A target or end that management desires to reach.

Plans

The actions or means managers intend to use to achieve organizational goals.

• Goal and Plan Evaluation

Next, managers will eval uate the advantages, disadvantages, and potential effects of each alternative goal and plan. They must prioritize those goals and even eliminate some of them. Also, managers will consider care fully the implications of alternative plans for meeting highpriority goals. In particular, they will pay a great deal of attention to the cost of any initiative and the investment return that is likely to result. In our magazine publishing example, your evaluation might determine that newsstand sales alone wouldn't be profitable enough to justify the launch. Perhaps you could improve profits with an online edition supplemented by Podcasts.

• Goal and Plan Selection

Once managers have assessed the various goals and plans, they will select the one that is most appropriate and feasible. The evaluation process will identify the priorities and trade-offs among the goals and plans. For example, if your plan is to launch a number of new publications, and you're trying to choose among them, you might weigh the different up-front invest ment each requires, the size of each market, which one fits best with your existing product line or company image, and soon. Experienced judgment always plays an important role in this process.

• Implementation

Once managers have selected the goals and plans, they must implement the plans designed to achieve the goals. Even the best plans are useless if they are not implemented properly. Managers and employees must understand the plan, have the resources to implement it, and be motivated to do so. Including employees in the previous steps of the planning process paves the way for the implementation phase. As we mentioned earlier, employees usually are better informed, more committed, and more highly motivated when a goal or plan is one that they helped develop.

• Monitor and Control

Although it is sometimes ignored, the sixth step in the formal planning process monitoring and controlling-is essential. Without it, you would never know whether your plan is succeeding Managers must continually monitor the actual performance of their work units against the unit's goals and plans. They will also need to develop control systems to measure that performance and allow them to take corrective action when the plans are implemented improperly or when the situation changes.

1. Analyze the influence that legal issues, ethics, and corporate social responsibility have had on management planning at BP. Provide at least one example for each.

2. Analyze at least three factors that influence the company's strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency planning.