Strategic Planning in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): A Case Study of Botswana SMEs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although small and medium enterprises contribute immensely to the economy of a country, they are characterised by low performance and high failure rate which is often blamed on lack of resources such as funds, land and skilled labour. Many business management specialists argue that even on the availability of such resources, some SMEs still fail due to lack of strategic planning. Extent literature indicates that formal strategic planning improves business performance as it involves deriving a game plan that enables SMEs to anticipate and respond to the turbulent market by arranging their resources and capabilities accordingly. As such, this research investigates the status of strategic planning by SMEs in Botswana. The study also investigates the perceived value of Strategic Planning by SME owner managers, and the extent of planning as well as identifying the barriers that prevent effective strategic planning. Using semi-structured interviews of 36 Small and Medium firms selected across several sectors, the study finds that strategic planning efforts do exist within SMEs but most of these firms engage in strategic planning activities to a limited extent. The study also finds several barriers, which contribute to lack of strategic planning. For instance, the study finds that most SME owner/managers have limited knowledge in the area of strategic planning. Some indicated that they do not plan because of the size of the business. Whereas some admitted that they still possess the traditional based thinking where most business decisions are based on intuition. The findings of this study have implications for policy decision makers and SME owner managers.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it