“The future ain’t what it used to be,” Yogi Berra once said.
Strategic planning identifies where a business or organization wants to be at some point in the future and how it is going to get there.
It scares people, in part, because it seems so remote from the tactics required to keep one’s eye on the ball, especially now. The old joke about draining the swamp when you are up to your keester in alligators comes to mind.
Strategy is about looking around corners a few years away, while many businesses are currently focused on what’s happening right now and rightly so.
A few months back, I was one of the mentors at the Brampton Small Business Enterprise Centre’s Energize Your Business workshop. I had table chats about strategic planning with four groups of eight businesses, all different, but all wondering if long-range planning was some sort of magic elixir, perhaps because the short-term view was so unappealing.
Some openly mused about the value of strategic planning in such a volatile environment. And nearly all complained about external factors, things they could not control, impacting success.
I talked about better understanding internal and external factors and suggested each conduct a simple SWOT analysis to separate the things they could control from those they could not. Planning helps identify what they are and forces you to think about how you might respond.
Most of the 32 businesses were coping, some even doing better than expected. But only one had a plan that spanned more than a year.
The “strategic” part of planning is the need to pay attention to changes that impact your business – internal and external -over a period of time. Unless you have a crystal ball, strategic plans will undoubtedly require course corrections.
As Yogi would say, “you gotta be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, otherwise you might not get there.”
Do you have a vision and a long-range plan for your business or organization? How is it weathering the current economic storm?
Creative Thinking or Idea Theft
By Jeff Bowman
I once had an idea, a really great original idea. It occurred to me as I stepped out of the shower one morning – a better and quicker way to dry off. I still have it, and may have it for many years to come.
“Business Philosopher” Jim Rohn said “labour gives birth to ideas.”
I teach a course on Creativity for businesses that have reached the point where independent thinking is either missing in action or not encouraged. We have all heard that there isn’t much new under the sun – any single thought you have has probably been thought of in another place and time by many other people. Recycled products turn retro. New fashion relies on vintage fashion. New movies rely on old television shows.
But, if you follow through and make the idea a reality and stamp it with your signature, then it is deemed to be yours. There have been many instances in the past where what were thought to be original ideas were later discovered to be duplicated, point in case George Harrision’s my Sweet Lord. After it went to the top of the charts in 1970, Harrison ended up in court because the tune sounded close to “He’s So Fine”, an earlier hit by the Chiffons. The court ruled that Harrison “unintentionally copied” the tune, which cost him the royalties from the song. What was thought to be new and original might have been heard before and simply popped out like a new tune.
Then again, there are people who will wait in the weeds and essentially steal someone’s idea and make it their own. Success breeds success so why reinvent the wheel? These people usually come undone when they are required to demonstrate ability or creativity to a client. Everyone knows that a good innovative product can be knocked off in a foreign market very quickly and brought to the marketplace as an “original” (counterfit) or with names like Polystation, Diadias and others.
If you pass off someone else’s Grade nine project with your name on it and get caught, you fail. The same is true in business and the results may be more damaging. When entering the strategic planning phase of your business, ensure that every great idea that emerges is fully researched, the same holds true for new businesses selecting a company name and website url. If you hear an idea and think to yourself, “hey that sounds familiar”, it probably is, so, be careful what you “think”!
“An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.” Stephen Fry.
I talked about better understanding internal and external factors and suggested each conduct a simple 
I once had an idea, a really great original idea. It occurred to me as I stepped out of the shower one morning – a better and quicker way to dry off. I still have it, and may have it for many years to come.
