Week 3

I think the two key points to remember from this week's readings were the importance of strategy and attaining the effectiveness of planning.

Strategy is important because it serves as the basis of planning. Knowing what to do in order to achieve set goals, much time and costs can be significantly saved.

Although plans may change according to circumstances that arise, there would be minimum problems posed when there is a solid strategy. However, we should never neglect the need to plan effectively in order to avoid confusion when monitoring the delegated tasks.

The reading made me think more about public relations theory/practice in that it stresses on the mechanism of management in this field. A PR manager has to know how the leading tasks affect the follow-up ones and which of those can be carried out concurrently in order to save time and energy. Mintzberg and colleagues proposed that a PR practitioner must always bear in mind the five Ps when coming up with a strategy (Mintzberg et al. 1998; Mintzberg et al. 2003). Out of the five Ps, I find that perspective is the most prominent because without understanding the corporation's views, the publics will in turn not understand the aims of the corporation and just what it can do for them. Without understanding the publics' opinions of their environment, the corporation cannot relate to their interests. Thus, the PR manager is unable to mesh both cogs, the corporation and the publics, together which makes planning unnecessarily more tedious having to go back and forth for approval.