Published on the 11/04/2012 | Written by Brett Roberts
For successful companies, says Brett Roberts, it’s all about preparing for the battle. But while you can’t succeed without adequate preparation, planning can quickly veer into ‘useless’ territory, especially when those ‘best laid plans’ equate to little more than opportunities lost…
I recently stumbled across a wonderful quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower which says “in preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. In that one, simple Twitter-sized sentence he encapsulates several wonderful business life lessons which are worth teasing out further.
Firstly, for successful companies businesses is all about ‘preparing’ and ‘battle’. The level of ‘battle’ will vary substantially but the requirement for and impact of preparation is a constant. Pretty much all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know have somehow found a way to take time out of working ‘in’ their business to work ‘on’ their business. In other words, they have understood the importance of ensuring their business is always prepared – be it for competition, innovation or general change – and my perception is that their businesses have become more resilient as a direct result.
Secondly, planning is pretty much useless for a variety of reasons. For starters, outputs from planning tend to be obsolete upon arrival i.e. by the time a highly-detailed business/marketing (or any other) plan is distributed, enough of the underlying assumptions and market conditions have changed to make the end-goal highly questionable, simply on the basis of margin of error. The other reason planning can veer into ‘useless’ territory is that it often consumes an inordinate quantity of people resource and that can result in substantial opportunity cost (yet it’s one few, if any, companies track and manage).
Lastly, and most importantly, Dwight was right: planning, or the process thereof, is indispensable. Planning requires research, focus, insight, communication and action and ALL of those are things which can and should happen on an on-going basis. To use management-speak, they should be part of the ‘rhythm of business’ and I would argue that those businesses which do this stuff have a much higher chance of long-term success than those that don’t.
So next time you’re stuck in one of those interminable management planning meetings check out mentally for a moment and have a think about what Dwight, the guy who helped mastermind the Allied invasion of Europe, would do in your situation. Chances are he wouldn’t want pages and pages of plans. What he would want are people who understand and can articulate the overall situation at any point in time and make smart decisions based on individual and team insight. In other words, what he would want is leadership. And the wonderful thing about leadership is that those who are successful at it get to write history and that’s a lot more fun than writing a plan.
