Why Corporate Planning Models?

Lewis Young, Editor-in-Chief of Business Week, suggested in 1976 that “Corporate planning models and management science are substitutes for good management.” On the other hand, one of the advertisers in Business Week, the International Business Machines Corporation, frequently devotes the major portion of its two-page advertisements to only two words—“what if?” In the lower right-hand corner of these ads one reads: “Planning will never become an exact science. But it can now be less of a venture into the unknown. The future is a moving target. Computers can improve your aim.” This paper is about corporate planning and how computer based planning models can be used to “improve your aim.”