Planning has been understood as an important management process to increase rationality (thus results, benefits or profits) of organizational decisions since long. Preparation of plans has become a must in virtually every modern organization, and planning techniques have reached high levels of theoretical sophistication. Very often, however, subsequent actions have little (if anything) in common with the preceding plans, which are rapidly forgotten and sent to pile up dust on the shelves. Eventually, this leads to the demoralization of the planning process itself and the reinforcement of the misguided notion that improvisation and intuition are the sole and irreplaceable sources of organizational decisions. Whath are the reasons for this? The authors understand that it is due both to misperceptions of the true role usefulness of the planning process among managers and members of the organization, and to the errors of the planners themselves. In the second half of this article, the authors propose a set of premises, and suggest a group of strategies to facilitate the transformation of plans into planned action.