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Way back in 1981, I think it was, a business book literally kept me up all night reading.* It was Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, about a rogue team building a pioneer mini-computer at Data General. Well, it's happened again, with one of the trip-reading picks I mentioned the other day. Namely, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth. Hate to use the hackneyed term, but it's a real page turner, and among other things it gives the best description of "business strategy" unfolding in a world changing at warp speed. (*The only other biz book that caused an all-nighter was Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning—which I read on my first trip to Dubai ever so long ago.)
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Comments
Thanks for that Tom. I love the idea of 'planning' in todays world - a comedy best seller potential here! I remember you once saying Honda (I think it was Honda) had a 500 year strategic plan. What time frame do you think planning should take nowadays My best guess is weekly for the small company, daily (maybe hourly) for the one person set up. For larger organisation I cannot see the point of planning at all frankly. Just go with the flow and anyway what is large these days? :-)
Posted by Trevor Gay at October 3, 2005 11:31 AM
Planning is important. That "500 Year Plan" is probably an overstatement, but companies like Honda do a lot of long-range planning. Plans don't have to be micromanaging documents. Japanese business plans, in my experience, usually consist of definite goals and objectives to reach them. Long-term plans don't constrict a company into ignoring opportunities, but they give a vision of where the company should be in 'x' years and how to get there. I don't think the one person company or the large organization can just go along with no plan. Seriously, the world is not changing at light speed like so many claim. Look beyond the magazine/internet articles, blogs, and occasional book and you will see change, sure, but not at a speed that negates the necessity of good planning. Most of what claims to be fact-based reporting or "trend analysis" turns out to be grounded on minimal facts and lots of speculation. (A new foreign-owned factory opens in China every 26 minutes. Honda planned for that eventuality at least 15 years before it occurred. Honda of America opened in Ohio in 1986, but the success of the Civic in the US during the early to mid-1970s prompted the plan to do so.) Think of the companies everyone loves these days--GE, Google, Yahoo, etc. You don't think they have some short-term, mid-term, and long-range plans? I don't see CEO Immelt at GE saying to the board, "well, we'll just see what pops up and try to jump on it." Stockholders would love that, wouldn't they?
Posted by Mike at October 5, 2005 6:18 AM