Issues Management in Strategic Planning

Emerging issues in the external environment have more influence on the future of corporations than do their CEO's and strategic management team. As a result, corporate executives must anticipate and manage emerging external issues in addition to their traditional internally focused responsibilities. Renfro has provided the first comprehensive chart of these new, uncertain waters. From environmental scanning, to issues research, to developing priorities and issue action strategies, Renfro brings state-of-the-art concepts and methods down to practical applications with his pioneering models of the life cycles of public issues at the national and state level.

Once the issues management process is presented and explained, Renfro turns to two important concepts: how to design and build an issues management function in an existing organization; and second, the changing role of the issues media in the evolving public issues process. Backed with timely examples of successes and failures in managing emerging issues, Renfro distills two decades of experience into a series of guidelines. Renfro also reviews the most popular pitfalls--fast cats, fat cats, black, and copy cats--in building an issues management capability.