Strategy is about creating a plan to differentiate your business from the competition and to gain a competitive advantage. This book is about the fundamentals of strategic planning for the small business owner and his or her leadership team. Strategic planning is an essential process for every size business. While large businesses may have more resources and time to devote to strategic planning, small businesses have the advantage of being close to their stakeholders and the ability to move quickly.

Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. Written for computer scientists and engineers with interests in artificial intelligence, robotics, or control theory, this is the only book on this topic that tightly integrates a vast body of literature from several fields into a coherent source for teaching and reference in a wide variety of applications. Difficult mathematical material is explained through hundreds of examples and illustrations.