Tag Archives: Strategic planning

April 18, 2014 · 8:13 am

Thought And Preparation

This is the time of year when many families host some sort of holiday gathering.

Grupp från Bonniers bokförlag vid middagsbord ...

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It might be a Passover seder or it could be an Easter Sunday gathering.  Our Foodie Friday Fun this week was spurred by that sort of activity.  I’m sure you’ve been to gatherings of this sort where the host had it all together.  The food came to the table all at the same time and at the appropriate serving temperature.  There were no shrieks of “we forgot the rolls” midway through the meal (you rarely hear that at a seder, by the way).  The snacks and drinks are out when guests arrive and the entire experience is executed with efficiency.

I’ve been to meals of a very different sort.  The food comes out one dish at a time and sits on the table until everything is ready, getting cold in the process.  The menu is not quite complete, usually because it wasn’t thought through carefully.  That’s really the point this week – the need for thought and preparation in the kitchen.  Turns out it’s critical in business too.

The two things need to go together for the cook – or businessperson – to be successful.  The hosts who don’t have it all together did think about what to serve.  There was thought.  The problem is that they didn’t translate that thought into preparation.  They didn’t have a real plan.  The opposite is also true.  You can prepare all you want – make various dishes – but without careful thought beforehand, the odds are that you’ll have a meal that just doesn’t work since no one wants all proteins or to have to make a last minute run to the store for the ingredients you didn’t write on your shopping list.

It’s the same in business.  Not taking the time to think a project or situation through before organizing those thoughts into the various types of preparation the enterprise needs to do is futile.  That preparation will have to be redone when something that wasn’t thought through comes to light.  It’s nice when someone volunteers to “dive in” to a project but it’s even better when they make that dive after thinking through the depth of the pool.

I hope if you end up at a gathering of family or friends this weekend you’ll take a step back and appreciate the thought and preparation that went into the day.  If it’s been done well you probably wouldn’t notice it otherwise.  It’s when there isn’t thought and preparation – done together – that you do notice because things go horribly wrong.  Make sense?

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February 5, 2014 · 9:39 am

Prognostications

Want to have some fun?  Do a search for “predictions for 2013″ and use a search range of the six weeks prior to the start of the year.

Super Bowl Sunday Crystal Ball

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You can do this for any year, but I took 2013 since the results of those predictions are still fresh in our minds.  Throwing out the fringe sources, one can find respected publications and authors making predictions about what was supposed to have happened last year.  You can click though here to a bunch from The Washington Post, as an example.  In some cases, they did pretty well.  In others, they could not have been more wrong (predicting Michelle Bachmann would become House Speaker when she ended up leaving Congress is just one example).

This sort of exercise seems sort of silly yet every business does this on a regular basis.  It’s important that we do so to a certain extent.  We need to predict demand and project sales.  We need to anticipate tastes and try to be ready when our customers need us to be.  The real issue, however, comes when we think we can predict the unpredictable.  To me that’s anything more than about six months down the road (something to think about the next time you’re asked for a five-year plan).

Most of us tend to weigh recent events much more heavily than longer term indicators. We also tend to forget that the past can only predict the future to a limited extent. Using data to make educated guesses is great, but it’s not the same as  predicting.  A forecast is an extension of trends.  It’s almost something a computer can do with a well thought out algorithm.  A prediction takes other factors into account.  Political realities that might change trends.  New technologies that can be disruptive and change those historical trends.

10 years ago here was one sage’s prediction for Facebook:

Facebook, lame or not, was certainly a heavy hitter of 2004, but watch out, I have a strong feeling it’s going to jump the shark. Maybe it already has.

Maybe so, but a billion plus users 10 years later shows just how hard accurate predicting can be.  Have any predictions you’d like to share?

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June 25, 2013 · 9:08 am

Finding Feasibility

Ever been a part of a feasibility study?  You know – a bunch of people have a bright idea and it’s good enough that there needs to be a serious investigation into whether it can be done or not.

The former York to Hull Railway - geograph.org...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A team is put together (hopefully including those whose idea it was in the first place) and questions are drawn up.  In some ways those questions are like a mini business plan.  What’s the potential market for this idea?  What are the resources needed to bring it to life?  What sort of on-going support will it require?  Can it be done in a reasonable time frame or will it take so long that the potential evaporates?  And of course, what are the legal ramifications if we do what we’re proposing to do?

I want to focus on that last little bit because I think it’s illustrative of a broader point.  Lawyers are trained to protect their clients (which are, by the way, the companies for which they work  and not YOU, dummy).   To many of them, the status quo is a lovely place (assuming the company is not tied up in litigation).   That’s not really the best place, however, for many businesses.  In fact, in some businesses such as tech, the status quo is a death sentence.  When the feasibility of something new is brought up, I’ve worked with some lawyers who were fabulous at finding ways to say “no.”  The could spot a potential problem long before any of us could and they didn’t hesitate to cite those problems are reasons not to proceed.

Here is what they – and you – need to keep in mind:

Obstacles are huge and opportunities are small:  one often hides the other.

How many people underestimate what’s feasible since obstacles can be readily apparent but the opportunities hidden behind them get missed?  We need to do what the better lawyers (and executives) I’ve known always did:  spot the opportunity and find a way to remove the obstacle blocking your path.  Some feasibility efforts are the business equivalent of the blue screen of death:  the system has reached an issue it can’t handle and throws in the towel.

I’m a believer in almost anything being feasible as long as there is flexibility, some tolerance for risk, and a willingness to adjust as you learn.  People – and businesses – have done things a certain way for years and in most cases it’s working for them.  Trying something new or doing things in a new way might not seem feasible and it’s not if there is a predisposition towards allowing the obstacles to obscure the opportunity.  But I’ll bet you can tell me about a time when you tried to do something in a new way – you shut your eyes and didn’t see the obstacles but visualized the opportunity – and succeeded.  So tell me!

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