Strategic Choice as a Negotiated Outcome

With increasing pressures for public accountability by private enterprise, the zone of strategic discretion for top level corporate managers is being reduced. Preliminary evidence from recent field research in a major electric utility showed that corporate plans of major strategic significance were not only “formulated” (within the company) but “negotiated” (implicitly if not explicitly) with external parties. To the extent that this phenomenon characterizes policy formation in corporations generally, conventional concepts of corporate strategy formulation as a “rational comprehensive” process are not descriptively accurate and perhaps not even as prescriptively useful as they might be.