Strategic planning and firm performance: a comparison across countries and sectors

The level of uncertainty and pace of change in business environments is posing challenges for firms. The developed economies have transformed from the industrial era to the knowledge and service era, while emerging economies thrive with industrial growth. This poses the question of what the key drivers of corporate success are and how far they are different from the old earnings logic. We will focus on one special value-creating resource or capability, namely strategic planning. We empirically examine the performance consequences of strategic planning to determine in what contexts it pays off particularly well. We use data from a large-scale survey of about 2,500 organisations from developed and emerging countries. The survey responses represent a variety of industries from manufacturing to services. The analysis is based on general linear models, and the findings show significant performance differences across countries, industries, and firm size - with strategic planning explaining performance much better than any contextual characteristics.