This article broadly reviews the history of planning, its successes and failures, existing research on planning, and the theoretical and cultural underpinnings by which planning takes place. It reflects the profound and ubiquitous triumph of the planning paradigm in the twentieth (and now twentyfirst) century. It provides material adjudicating the validity of using, or not using, one or another planning technique, and suggests alternative procedures to eliminate possible time-wasting bureaucratic routines, constraints on organizational action, and losses resulting from myopia frequently introduced by the planning process. The objective of this article is to illuminate an area of human activity that, to date, has been largely ignored by scholarly study.