SRI Report No. 168, dated April 1963, gave the corporate planning ritual its name.
The idea that a corporation should write down its long-term intentions in a formal document emerged from the intersection of military planning and postwar management consulting. The RAND Corporation, founded in 1948, applied systems analysis developed during World War II to civilian problems, and its methods spread into corporate boardrooms through consultants trained in operations research.1
The Stanford Research Institute's Theory and Practice of Planning group, led by Robert Franklin Stewart between 1962 and 1971, produced the most influential body of work on corporate planning practice. SRI Report No. 168, titled "The Strategic Plan" and dated April 1963, codified the template that companies would follow for decades.2 The same report introduced the stakeholder concept.
Igor Ansoff, who worked at SRI in association with Lockheed, published Corporate Strategy in 1965, providing the theoretical framework for strategic planning as a discipline.3 By the 1970s, nearly every Fortune 500 company maintained a strategic planning department.
Henry Mintzberg published The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning in 1994, arguing that the formal planning process had become a ritual detached from actual strategy. Planning, he wrote, produced plans, not strategies, and the two were not the same thing.4 The distinction between strategy as an emergent process and planning as a bureaucratic exercise has shaped management thinking since.