People practice strategic planning when they want to design plans that can be successful over the long term and which take into consideration potential risks and unforeseen opportunities. In most strategic planning models, people begin at one step and think of a number of different ways to move forward to the next step. They also consider events that might occur between steps and how they can prepare for them. To choose the best strategic planning books, you have to consider why you are accessing a book and which goals you hope to achieve through reading it. For instance, if you are a management student in college, the best strategic planning books are probably those assigned by your teacher and which often can be found on class syllabi.
Strategic planning books are also commonly used by professionals who are looking for new ideas that they can use at work. For instance, if you are a manager who needs to sit down with colleagues to devise a new business plan, you might seek out strategic planning books that give you ideas for how to go about planning in a group. A good book might suggest formats for planning charts, facilitation methods for brainstorming sessions, and methods for assigning values to various objectives and voting on them.
It also is important to know that there are different kinds of strategic planning, so there might also be different perspectives represented in strategic planning books. For instance, goals-based books might teach readers how to develop plans based on objectives. Books about scenario-based planning methods, on the other hand, teach readers about how to prepare for potential events and situations. These kinds of strategic planning books might be great for discussions about risk management.
Other professionals might choose strategic planning books based on their industries or areas of expertise. If you are a marketing professional, for example, you might benefit from books about strategic marketing. In these books, you might learn how best to gather market research and how to make sure that you use this intelligence well.
Regardless of why you need strategic planning books, it always is important that you do a little research about the authors who write them. Sometimes you need only to look at the back of a book to see than an author has years of experience as a successful manager and has written a number of other books on similar subjects. In other cases, however, you might benefit from going online and finding out a little more about an author's qualifications.