Introduction and Problem Statement

Strategic management aims at ensuring organizational survival and performance in the long term. Uncertainty has been perceived as a factor exacerbating strategic management. To foster long-term decision-making despite uncertainty, scenario planning has been proposed as a strategic management tool. Up until today, scenario planning has however gained little attention from the academic community. Hence, there is only limited general research on scenario planning and a lack of an in-depth assessment of scenario planning’s cultural sensitivity. The main objective of this study is to examine whether scenario planning can be used as a tool for strategic management in a standardized manner worldwide, or whether, due to different cultural conditions in the host countries, the scenario planning process needs to be adapted to these specific cultural profiles in order to be able to use the technique efficiently and effectively. This is conducted from the point of view of a multinational corporation. The chapter starts by introducing the concept of strategic management to then discussing the situation of the strategic management process of multinational corporations caught between globally standardized and locally adapted practices. Therefore, the chapter provides an overview on two concepts to classify multinational corporations—the EPRG model of Perlmutter and the I/R model of Bartlett and Ghoshal. In this context, the cultural sensitivity of strategic management as neglected part of management research is discussed. The chapter ends by laying out the objective, academic and practical relevance, and outline of the book.