Louis Gerstner: A Practical Take On Strategic Planning

To celebrate fifty years of its quarterly magazine (now online of course), McKinsey & Co is going back through some of its best articles to find the ones that still resonate today. Louis Gerstner, who once said that “the last thing International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) needs right now is a vision,” before leading the company’s turnaround as its CEO, worked at McKinsey earlier in his career and had the same skeptical view of vague “forecast planning” even then. Gerstner isn’t actually opposed to strategic planning, but he argued that too often these programs “offer no overview, no analyses of…