Three levels of results: Roger Kaufman's Mega planning in theory and practice
The influence of Roger Kaufman over the field of management, strategic thinking and educational planning spans over the past 57 years, since his Mega planning concept emerge in an article with Corrigan (1969)
Kaufman's ideas influenced my own work and practice since I ran into one of his early books about systematic planning in education (1972) when I was working in developing a comprehensive training plan for the Civil Service in Argentina as a consultant for UNDP.
I met Roger personally in 1993 and we have been working together ever since. But the foundation stone of our collaboration came in 1995, when I asked for his help with a project in the NW of Argentina for a recently privatized set of oil refineries and pipelines known as REFINOR - or Refineries of the North-.
During 3 years (1995-1998) we applied Mega planning by investing in developing entrepreneurs in the region out of former public employees that have chosen to leave the former government-owned company with hefty compensations. I was lucky enough to return to the area in 2002, after the economic downfall of Argentina's economy and the acquisition of REFINOR by the Brazilian state-owned Petrobras that have stopped the Mega-focused programs and reverted to the "old school" line of management, with devastating consequences.
The silver lining in this sad ending was that I was able to gather business and social results data in Kaufman's three levels (MIcro, Macro and Mega) for a 9-year period (1993-2002). The results, published in an 2005 article titled "Achieving Business Success by Developing Clients and Communities" were impressive. Mega planning not only worked in doing good to the communities, but it also worked in making the company do well and even better than its competitors over a 3-year period compared with two other 3-year periods of conventional "inward-looking" management 3 years before and 3 years after.
Here Roger Kaufman himself evokes the process of developing and disseminating his new and revolutionary concepts against the inertia of "conventional thinking"
I picked Strategic Planning for Success because it was the book we used then as a guide for our use of Mega planning and the OEM model. Kaufman has continued to produce books in every other aspect of his vast model almost every year since, so it was a hard choice.
Today, under the growing influence of the Corporate Social Responsibility movement and the increasing adoption of double-bottom line business case to account for the value of what economists and MBA schools traditionally grouped as "externalities" -and that now represent almost 70 percent of the book value of companies like Google, Apple or Amazon- Kaufman pioneering ideas are becoming the new mainstream.
These are some books and articles we recommend to those in CSR or other areas to successfully engage not just in "compliance" with CSR standards, but in demonstrating the return on investment of proactive social impact.
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