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Strategy Journeys starts from the premise that strategic planning suffers from a bad press: it can be seen as complex, technical, remote from the day-to-day reality of an organisation, undertaken by an elite specialist executive group, producing threatening changes whose rationale is barely understood – or, perhaps worse still, having no worthwhile impact at all.For many senior executives, strategic planning is too daunting a task, which is why they often seek help from those with the expertise to guide the process: they have a severe lack of confidence in their own ability to design, plan and implement such an important and major project.Yet organisations have never had greater need for a flexible, resilient and engaging approach to strategic planning than now. How do those leading an organisation know where to start, what approach to take and how to go about the process of strategic planning? David Booth aims to help them by demystifying the concept and propounding a ‘first principles'approach to developing a strategic plan within the context of the individual organisation and with the flexibility to adapt the process to focus on what really matters. He suggests the key questions that should be asked when considering embarking on a strategic planning ‘journey'to help design and guide the process.

Conceived as a response to the economic naïvety and implicit metropolitan bias of many 1950s and 60s studies of ‘the sociology of development', this volume, first published in 1975, provides actual field studies and theoretical reviews to indicate the directions which a conceptually more adequate study of developing societies should take.Much of the book reflects strongly the influence of Andre Gunder Frank, but the contributors adopt a critical attitude to his ideas, applying them in empirical situations within such African and American countries as Kenya, Guyana, Tanzania and Peru. Others pursue the lines of enquiry opened up by Latin American theories of economic ‘dependency'and by the new school of French economic anthropology.