TEN
(10) WAYS
TO GUARANTEE FAILURE
IN THE
CORPORATE PLANNING PROCESS
1.
Assume planning is not important to the success of the business.
2. Do not plan with other departments.
3. Do not communicate a shared vision.
4. Use last year’s never-supported plan with a few minor changes.
5. Mail a big package of forms to line mangers.
6. Buy Porter’s books and automatically assume you’re an expert planner.
7. Write “competitive advantage” three times fast and assume you have it.
8. Use a short-term and narrow reward system.
9. Be in competition with other departments rather than external competitors.
10. Don’t think; and never be creative.
Implementing a
structured planning process in the corporate environment is not a simple task.
Even with the most logical planning process, human beings do not always
work together for the common good of the organization.
The first road
block you are likely to encounter when you attempt to significantly improve the
planning process in your organization is the we-do-that-already mentality.
Most top executives have been planning for decades, and they believe that
a plan is a plan, and they already plan just fine thank you.
Other road blocks include: managers who will not participate in a process
that they did not invent; and managers who do not want to discuss what their
business is doing (or not doing).
Some managers
are so driven by their quarterly or annual bonus plans that planning past
December 31 is not part of reality. Some
managers believe they know how to plan - it’s the other managers who don’t
know what they’re doing, and therefore, it’s a waste of time to plan with them.
Planning also requires thinking and making decisions - two actions not
relished by all executives. The
result is often corporate paralysis.
Another major road block is the
incorrect identification of the businesses.
Beware of lumping businesses together in a futile effort to make planning
easier.
TEN
(10) MORE
WAYS TO GUARANTEE FAILURE IN PLANNING
11.
Do not link strategy with implementation.
12. Avoid measurement systems
which gauge success.
13. Expand the size of the
planning department to indicate how important it is.
14. Be quick to blame the
person next to you.
15. Fire people often to show
Wall St. analysts you can make tough decisions.
16. Focus on internal
transfer pricing issues every Tuesday and Thursday.
17. Spend most of your time
looking at the numbers - any numbers.
18. Never re-allocate or
retrain staff; only fire and hire and fire again.
19. Blame poor results on the
sales force and/or the customer.
20. Do not hold anyone
accountable for the planning process.
A planning staff
which is not trained in the field of strategic planning is as effective as a
computer programming staff not trained in computer programming.
This is not to say that a really bright individual rotating throughout
the company can’t perform well. Nor
is it true that someone who has been in planning for over twenty years is
necessarily properly trained. Strategic
planning is, and should be viewed as, a challenging professional discipline that
requires some formal training, even though the profession has no certification
body analogous to the American Bar Association.
It is
unfortunate that so many business executives have agreed to participate in a
planning process only to be disappointed in the low level of results.
In many cases, the planning process used was flawed from the start.
A poor planning process will likely lead to poor results.
What
needs to be recognized, however, is that even if you analyze the current
environment perfectly, predict the future industry structure flawlessly, and choose
an excellent strategy, your company is still not guaranteed success.
It also takes good people, hard work, and sometimes luck.
But over the long-run, just like at the casinos, the odds will greatly
favor the company that can plan better and faster than the competition.
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