| Summary: | Frequently discussed in different contexts, corporate strategy and strategic planning is something which importance hardly will diminish over the coming years as competition grows harder. The needs for companies to think ahead of their business operations have grown increasingly during the decades. From the viewpoint of an independent researcher I have decided to look at Swedish companies operating in Sweden and abroad. I want to know how the strategic planning process takes place in these companies, in order to give an insight to what the process could look like in Sweden today. My research question has been: How is strategic planning perceived in Swedish companies? I have selected some different theories from the university library’s collection of databases, respectively dealing with leadership, outsourcing, business intelligence et cetera. These theories are the foundation of the semi-structured and by telephone, in-person and internet performed interviews with seven different managers at some selected companies in different businesses, mainly located in northern Sweden. Asking questions based on the underlying theories I have been able to draw some conclusions about the planning processes in the studied companies. The study shows that almost all companies have some kind strategic planning process and that more or less all of them to some extent consider some of the theories employed in the theory chapter. While only two companies seemed to be quite strict, the rest had some emergent semi-structured strategic plan with much flexibility, which is not necessarily wrong.
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