We were all learning together. We also learned that many of our strategic business units had some common elements in their strategies, such as markets, technologies, and distribution. Executives at the sector level reviewed detailed strategic plans of the related businesses and then submitted to corporate management a set of plans for the sector. This reduced the load on top corporate management substantially. Strategic planning is no longer done by strategic planning specialists.
Strategic planning is so ingrained in our thinking that every manager is a strategic manager.
One risk in having a central corporate group comes in combining too much information, thus making it bland and useless. The trick is to make sure that the information being combined is actually related. It increases one's understanding by putting the information together. Now, also keep in mind that an executive can't just sit atop of all that aggregated information. You must still sniff around and get a sense for what is happening out in the business.