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California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
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Article Information
How Good Are Long-Range Projections of GNP for Business Planning?
Colm, Gerhard
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2
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Winter
1959
):
1
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10
This article focuses on the role of long range planning in making a business successful or a failure. According to the author, Decisions affecting the firm's future business plans should always be made by using every bit of information available, including current trends in orders, rate of operation, changes in the competitive position, price and cost data, financial data and so on. Economic projections can never take the place of the conventional methods of business analysis: they can serve only as an additional but very useful tool. Most business economists hardly need to be persuaded that long-range projections of Gross National Product are a useful tool, particularly for business planning. The fact that business firms have come more and more to use long-range economic projections in their business planning does not mean, however, that projections can answer all of a company's planning problems. Long-range projections can serve as a means for appraising current trends, judging to what extent they exceed a pace of growth, which can be sustained or to what extent they reflect a temporary slack in the economy as a whole or a specific industry. In this respect, long-range projections as it least a partial guide to long-range planning seem to offer the best device for a business policy designed to exploit opportunities and protect itself from over-expansion.
