Planning viewpoint: Top management

Planning is action laid out in advance. It is a central, essential function of management, because a manager must lay out some pattern of action in order to direct effectively the functioning of the organization. While managers plan, by habit and by instinct, the functioning of large modern organizations requires that plans be shared, so that groups of managers act in coordinated patterns toward accomplishment of agreed objectives. Thus, planning has become an organizational process in addition to the individual process of each manager.