Grave Consequences of Lack of Strategic Plan at the Highest Level of Government: S.P. as a Defense Against the Malice of Short-Sighted and Self-Serving Leaders

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of strategic Planning at the macro level by the US government in order to archive strategic long-term goals. While in the present tumultuous global environment, political, economical, social, and security areas that make planning more formidable and challenging and call for some kind of “built-in flexibility” in the plan as well as continuous environmental scanning using the state of the art technology, the need for strategic plan is felt more than ever at the highest level of government. In the absence of such plan, the bulk of government efforts will be focused on dealing with existing problems and finding short-term solutions that while necessary, prevent from having a more in-depth long-term perspective on strategic issues confronting the country causing problems that if not resolved, will jeopardize the country and the world in the future. Such short-term perspective will also encourage short-sighted leaders to sacrifice long-term essential goals at the expense of short-term achievements that attract less informed voters helping them to stay in office and satisfy their own whims and egos. This paper will look at the grave consequences of lacking the strategic plan at the highest level of government, i.e. the chief executive office (the presidential office) for achieving long-term strategic goals without interference by wishy-washy leaders holding high offices for short period of times that otherwise, may create damages that are not either repairable or hard and costly to correct, thus derailing the society from a sound and systematic pathway of progress. Example of strategic issues like ignoring long and even medium term consequences of environmental changes, economic and trade relationship with other countries that due to globalization demands an integrated network, ignoring international accords that lead to cooperation, collaboration among nations are addressed including a model for an effective and well designed strategic plan (SP) needs to be put in place using the state or art SP technologies that include a modified and expanded version of Balanced Score Card (BSC) within a systems framework.