A comparison of strategic planning practices in companies from the UK and Turkey

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the nature and practice of strategic planning in two different environmental contexts, the UK and Turkey. Employing a structured mail questionnaire, the study collected data from a sample of UK and Turkish firms. Using a sampling frame of 500 firms from the EXTEL database of UK listed companies, 113 usable responses were received for the UK firms. In total, 135 responses were obtained from the Turkish firms based on a sampling frame of 638 firms derived from the database of the Istanbul Chamber of Industry's 500 largest Turkish manufacturing companies and the database of companies quoted on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. There are a number of significant differences between the strategic planning practices of Turkish firms and UK firms. Contrary to expectations, it appears that Turkish firms rather than UK firms are more favourably disposed to strategic planning. The exception to this is the adoption and use of a range of tools/techniques of strategic analysis, which are more regularly employed by UK firms than by Turkish firms. Organisations should be aware that strategy formulation is futile without appropriate strategy implementation and should seek a coherent interface between those responsible for the strategic planning process and those responsible for implementation to ensure that each group is working to the same set of objectives. With the development of the market economy in Turkey, and the increased competition from foreign firms as globalisation proceeds, it may be necessary for the Turkish firms to increasingly adopt the techniques and tools of strategic planning. This paper provides some important insights to the applicability of Western strategic management thinking to the business environment in emerging countries.