Strategic Planning Society Website Review for Executives
This paper reviews the Strategic Planning Society (SPS) website, a subscription-based platform designed to bridge academic research and practical strategic planning for senior executives. The review evaluates the site's overall design, target audience, content quality, navigational ease, and limitations. It examines what the site delivers — including journals, white papers, and analysis of major strategic frameworks — and what it lacks, such as tailored analytical tools and links to external resources. The paper concludes that the SPS site is a valuable professional resource for strategic planning, while identifying areas for improvement including trial membership options and more applied analytical frameworks.
- Overview of the Strategic Planning Society: SPS mission, membership model, and site purpose
- Site Design and Target Audience: Professional design aimed at executive-level users
- Content Strengths and Limitations: What the site delivers and where it falls short
- Value as a Professional Resource: Reasons the site merits inclusion in resource lists
- Missing Analytical Frameworks: Absence of applied strategic tools and frameworks
- Navigation and External Links: Site organization and limited external linking
- Overall Evaluation: Final verdict on usability and professional value
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What makes this paper effective
- The review is well-structured, moving logically from first impressions to specific content analysis to overall evaluation, giving readers a clear progression of assessment.
- It balances praise with constructive criticism, noting both the site's professional presentation and its gaps in applied frameworks and external linking.
- References to recognized strategic works — Porter's Competitive Advantage of Nations and Blue Ocean Strategy — ground the evaluation in established academic and professional benchmarks.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates evaluative writing through a structured criteria-based review. Each section addresses a specific dimension of the website (design, content, usability, missing elements), and the author consistently supports assessments with concrete observations and citations to relevant strategic literature, showing how professional resources should be judged against field standards.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into short, focused sections rather than traditional essay paragraphs. Each section addresses a distinct evaluative question — what the site does, what it lacks, why it would be used professionally, and what improvements could be made. This format suits a website review and makes the argument easy to follow for a professional audience. The conclusion synthesizes the overall verdict concisely.
Overview of the Strategic Planning Society
The purpose of this paper is to review the website for the Strategic Planning Society (SPS), an organization that seeks to bridge the gap between advances in academic research and the practical needs of business managers, directors, and CEOs who are looking for guidance on creating greater levels of strategic alignment in their organizations. The SPS operates several business models to sustain its growth, with a subscription-based membership to its content available for £199, which entitles the subscriber to access all research produced by the SPS in conjunction with leading universities. The website serves a dual purpose: acting as a lead generation tool for the Society, and showcasing the many other services it offers, including seminars, conferences, and access to a published magazine.
Site Design and Target Audience
The overall impression the site delivers is one of professionalism and ease of navigation to highly specific content relevant to the strategic planning process in companies. Designed to appeal specifically to director-level, VP-level, and CEO-level audiences, the site conveys a high degree of credibility through its content. The site seeks to serve as a strategic planning resource for its members and uses a series of content-based and navigation-based approaches to deliver this positioning message.
Content Strengths and Limitations
The SPS website delivers on its commitment to provide strategic planning content for executives and key managers, and it offers a clean, easily navigated interface that many managers — who may not use the web as frequently as others — will find accessible. However, the site does not deliver more specific strategic activities that can be directly applied to an organization. Furthermore, it does not provide any type of strategic framework by which companies can evaluate themselves. The journals, articles, white papers, and other content are broadly prescriptive, and as a result there is little tailoring of content to the specific needs of individual corporations.
References
Blue Ocean Strategy (2005). Book by the same name. Published February 3, 2005 by Harvard Business School Press.
CRM Buyer (2005). "Searching for Blue Ocean Strategies." Louis Columbus. CRMBuyer.com. September 23, 2005.
Porter, M. (1990). "Competitive Advantage of Nations." Harvard Business Review, March–April 1990.
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