Business Studies · Ch 4 — Planning
Introduction
Introduction
Planning is the bridge between where a business is and where it wants to be. Every manager has dreams — of higher sales, greater profits, and a stronger market position. But dreams alone achieve nothing. The real work begins when a manager thinks ahead, makes predictions about the future, and decides exactly what to do and how to do it. That act of thinking in advance is the essence of planning.
The textbook opens with the example of Indian Oil Company Limited (IOCL). The broad statements IOCL makes about its goals — such as becoming one of the top companies in India — are only the starting point. These statements must be broken down into concrete, step-by-step actions for implementation. This is true for every organisation, regardless of its size or ownership.
Planning is not optional. Every organisation — whether government-owned, a private business, or a company in the private sector — requires planning. The government makes five-year plans for the country. A small business has its own plans. Larger companies have sales plans, production plans, and big expansion plans. All of them have some plan.
The core idea is simple: to turn dreams into reality, managers must work hard at thinking about the future. They must make business predictions and set clear targets. Without advance thinking about what to do and how to do it, success remains a wish. With it, a dream becomes a goal, and a goal becomes a plan.
Indian Oil Company Limited (IOCL) is India's largest commercial organisation and, at the time the CBSE Class 12 Business Studies textbook cites, the top-ranked Indian company in the Fortune 'Global 500' listings (2017). A Maharatna company with a workforce of over 34,000, Indian Oil has been helping to meet India's energy demands and taking petroleum products to every part of the country for more than five decades, and it plans to expand its business operations around the world.
The company planned to invest about ₹20,000 crore in 2017-18 on acquisitions and overseas expansion. The previous year too it had invested close to ₹20,000 crore — including around ₹16,000 crore in various Indian projects and an acquisition for upstream operations in Russia. Notably, between 2012 and 2017 IOCL ended up investing around ₹75,000 crore against a targeted planned investment of around ₹56,200 crore, spending on refinery expansion, upgrading the quality of refineries, building new pipelines, more aggressive petrochemical projects and new natural-gas facilities. Overseas, it decided to open an office in Bangladesh (discussing LPG and natural-gas linkages from the IOC pipeline), planned a pipeline for Nepal from its upcoming Motihari terminal, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Bhutan, and looked at newly opening markets such as Myanmar. Where funds were needed on a project basis, the company was ready to go to the market — in India or overseas, whichever was cheaper — to borrow.
What it shows: These are broad statements of intent — plans that have to be broken down into concrete steps for implementation. That is exactly what planning means in this NCERT chapter: thinking in advance about what to do and how to do it. Every organisation, from the government's five-year plans to a small firm's own sales and production plans, needs planning.