And what's sort of on paper is described as a strategic planning exercise, really just turns into sort of a dog fight over resources for next year, right? A lot of this can be dominated by making projections, right? So, we grew at4% last year in our division, so we want to budget for 5% growth this year, but it's sort of arbitrary. And often times the resources of the organization are viewed as a fixed pie. What you have is a bunch of different division managers, or folks that are in charge certain aspects of the organization.

They can turn into sort of coalitions and empire building. We know from a lot of research on this that budgeting processes can breakdown. So if that's what it looks like in your organization, there are some downsides to that. And honestly it can oftentimes be more of a budgeting exercise. The problem, the challenge is, that a lot of times this can just be sort of subsumed within the sort of annual budget cycle, right? So, when that happens it doesn't end up being so much strategic thinking and sort of strategy setting, it's more of a planning exercise. So as a practical matter, this is how it sort of unfolds in a lot of organizations.

Are we doing the right things? Are we focused on the right things? Are we competing in the best way that we can, et cetera. And this might be something that comes up on an annual basis or a quarterly basis, or on some sort of a cycle where the organization has set aside time formally to sit down and say, hey let's re-look at our strategy. They have a sort of formal strategic planning session. So this is, I think, the most common way that organizations engage in trying to set strategy. So, let's start with a formal strategic planning process or exercise. I want to just give you a sense of what some of these ways of approaching strategy formulation might look like.

But this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the different ways that you could set strategy inside an organization. I'm going to touch base on a few of these different approaches just to give you an idea of what the different processes are that you might try to employ as you attempt to set strategy in your organization. Now this is a huge topic, I mean what we're talking about is, how does strategy get set inside organizations? So of course there's all kinds of ways organizations can approach strategy formulations. Lets focus on a few moments on strategy formulation.

Describe strategic war