S. Government, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in accordance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and also the shareholders. This has added cost and time constraints to their strategic planning process that could potentially cost them incremental business if they were able to respond to the market faster without having to contend with compliance initiatives first.
Ethics
Another aspect of the strategic planning process that has been influenced by the practices of Halliburton is the issue of ethics. In 2005 and 2006 Halliburton was cited by the U.S. Senate for knowingly serving unhealthy water to U.S. troops in the Camp Ar Ramadi province of Iraq (Donahue, 2006). This ethical lapse was found after the U.S. Senate learned that Halliburton had been given the contract for water purification services in the region, and did not audit their own performance. In other words, Halliburton had no way of knowing if the treatment of water was actually achieving its intended result or not (Donahue, 2006). This also made for a significant cost to their strategic planning process as today Halliburton must also provide for significant oversight to the U.S. Senate as to their activities in Iraq. This has also become a significant drain on their planning timelines as well.
Corporate Social Responsibility
The last factor, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is one area where the company is below average of three of the four factors One World Trust uses to quantify QSR performance over time. The figure shown, Halliburton Accountability Benchmarking (One World Trust, 2008) provides a graphical analysis of their performance over time. What is immediately apparent from reading One World Trust's report on Halliburton is the fact that their Compliant and Response processes are both internal and external in design and while the company does not have any significant efforts underway in sustainability or "green" initiatives they do have a CSR program for carbon reduction. Overall however Halliburton scores low on the attributes companies need to have in order to create and sustain an effective CSR program over time.
Factors Influencing Organizational Planning
The factors influencing the company's strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency planning are defined within...
Factors influencing the company's strategic planning include the ability to find projects that can in turn be turned into campaigns and then into strategies; in other words the ability to find a high level of congruence across all potential opportunities is critical. Factors that enable collaboration include multinational government policy, the ability to get short-listed on key programs as the design-in-favorite and the ability to influence projects in early stages of the development. Factors influencing tactical and operational planning include the pro forma financial statements and assumptions of one strategy relative to another, the creation of tactical alternatives, and given their ethical track record, oversight and compliance initiatives over time. Additional factors influencing strategic planning include logistics and project management of strategies once committed to. Finally from a contingency planning perspective, there is the need for high degrees of risk mitigation and campaigns that can absorb costs of projects if they do not succeed. There is also the challenge of creating contingencies in the event of political conflict and terrorism, as the company operates in regions of the world known for their instability. Taken together, these factors all contribute to a more methodical, concentrated approach to strategic planning that stays within governance given the lapses in ethical and legal performance from the past.
References
Mustafa Barth. (2003). Sand Castles in the Sahara: U.S. Military Basing in Algeria. Review of African Political Economy, 30(98), 679-685.
Jim Donahue. (2006). Dirty Halliburton. Multinational Monitor, 27(2), 8-9.
Sheila McNulty (2004, June 22). Halliburton ethics called into question: Court documents provide a disturbing backdrop, says Sheila McNulty: [LONDON 1ST EDITION]. Financial Times, p. 29.
One World Trust, (2008 12-14). 2008 Global Accountability Report. Retrieved May 19, 2009, from One World Trust Accountability Profile Web site: http://www.oneworldtrust.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=276&Itemid=55
Henry Waxman, John Dingell. (2004). "Don't Worry About Price": Whistleblowers Sound the Alarm on Halliburton in Iraq. Multinational Monitor, 25(3), 17-20.
