Passionate Planning

Passionate planning!  No, this is not about planning a hot date for the weekend!  It is about planning a hot future for your company.  Not knowing it - for the future is unknowable, uncertain, and frequently surprising - but planning it.

A familiar childhood story might help make the point:

 Alice in Wonderland said to the Cheshire-Cat, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

     "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

     "I don't much care where ---" said Alice.

     "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

     "---so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

     "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

The point of planning is not simply to arrive somewhere, like Alice.  Rather, it is to stake out a specific destination before commencing your journey, so that when you have walked long enough, you arrive at the destination you seek.

Strategic management embraces three equally important elements: planning, resources, and leadership.

Planning Bedrock.  Translating your dream into a strategic (business) plan is crucial to success.   Start with the planning bedrock of vision, values, and mission. Vision is the concrete statement of your dream you share with others.  Values are how you want business to be conducted and people to be treated, inside and outside the company.  Living out your values on a day to day basis defines your corporate culture.  Your mission is a focused statement of what you do - the product you produce, the service you offer - for whom, where, and how.  Vision is what you seek to be; mission is what you do.

The remainder of the plan delineates the goals, strategies, and action steps  necessary to achieve your vision.  It respects and builds on the strengths of your company as it exists in order to utilize the best ideas and methods available to meet future challenges and to grasp future opportunities.  At the same time, special attention is paid to the environment in which you operate, especially your competition.

Resources.  Committing resources to your vision is mandatory.  Resources, both financial and human, are finite.  Focusing them on goals to be achieved, rather than on activities to be undertaken, uses them to maximal advantage.

Leadership.  No efforts succeed without leadership at all levels.  You must wisely hire and responsibly develop all those who work within your company, in line with its future needs as encapsulated in its vision.

Translating your dream into a company vision is relatively easy.  Committing resources is harder, because inevitably you must take them from someplace else.  Investing in the development of your people is hardest of all, because it must be done individually and sustained over prolonged periods of time.  Companies that do all three passionately, succeed.

The passion and commitment necessary to achieve your goals and to surmount the inevitable setbacks can only come from the top.  The plan must be championed by you!  Your passion must shine through.

What benefits will you realize from passionate planning?  They are many, and they accrue regardless of the size of your company:

	A common direction develops.  Employees feel they are in one boat, rowing in unison, as part of a team.
	Resources are directed explicitly towards goals, not towards activities.  Each goal is justi-fied and approved, not each expenditure.
	A sense of uniqueness engenders enthusiasm and loyalty.
	Additional ideas for reaching the defined goals emerge because the vision is shared and all within the company helped with its formu-lation.
	Everyone is better informed about the company, both its challenges and opportunities.  As such, they are empowered to perform better, with less supervision.

In practical terms, your strategic plan:

	paints a clear vision (your dream),
	states your business philosophy (your character),
	highlights strategies (your time and money), and
	establishes markers of progress (your success).

A strategic plan is important at all stages of a company's growth.  When you are the sole employee, you need the discipline to stay on track and avoid some of the distractions that get in the way of accomplishing your desired goals.  As the company grows, its resources, opportunities, and horizons shift.  You must regularly re-examine its direction, in light of new ideas and markets.  In larger companies, your strategic plan is a potent force for keeping all employees on the same wavelength, effectively empowering each person because of their shared vision, if it is used.

Your plan is a baseline for achievement.  It is not a rigid document, but a flexible instrument.  It is only a snapshot, a single frame in a movie.  It cannot fully anticipate the fresh insights, new ideas, opportunities, and challenges you will encounter as you proceed with its execution.  Indeed, these will allow you to exceed the plan - and your dream -  not merely to achieve it!

van der Werff Global, Ltd.
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