I just read Is Brainstorming a Waste of Time? on Lateral Action. Consider this quote:

I’ve heard similar complaints from quite a few creative directors and professional creatives – instead of seeing brainstorming as essential to the company’s creative process, they see it as a chore, something to get out of the way as quickly as possible so that they can get on with the real business of creativity. Particularly in companies where everyone is expected to contribute to the brainstorm – not just the 'creative team' – some creative directors have said they see it as a matter of political expediency rather than a source of inspiration: by involving other departments, everyone gets to 'have their say', but the really valuable ideas don’t emerge until afterwards, when the creatives start work in earnest.

I don't know who first said that whenever a committee chooses a color, it's beige. I do know that strategy is often annoyingly obvious. The simplest output of a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is often the best.

Still, strategy isn't done best by committee, consensus, or vote.

There's a reason some people end up in marketing, others in sales, finance, or operations. One would hope, somehow, that the finance people do the finance, and the marketing people the marketing.

Dieting. Regular exercise. Investing. Planning.  All of them so much easier said than done. Easy to know what to do, but hard to do it, because you have to actually do it, repeatedly, not just know what to do. Emphasize, for me please, planning.

What do these things have in common? You guessed it. We know what we should do, but it takes patience, habits, discipline, routines. So we just don’t do it.

While driving over the weekend I heard the podcast of Terry Gross of NPR interviewing Joe Nocera of The New York Times about investment. He said that same thing (I’m paraphrasing):

Good investing takes patience, and waiting, and sticking to things. It’s a lot like dieting. We all know what we’re supposed to do, but we just can’t sustain it over the long term.

And related to this, I just picked up Autopilot Achievement: How to Turn Your Goals Into Habits on Zen Habits. Dealing, essentially, with the same underlying problem. In short:

It’s such a simple concept, yet it’s something we don’t always do. It’s not exceedingly difficult to do, and yet I think it’s something that would make a world of difference in anyone’s life.

Break your goals into habits, and focus on putting those habits into autopilot.

I immediately recognized the problem of planning, which is intended to be a matter of routinely reviewing and managing plans and comparing the plan to actual reality, and course corrections; but too often it just isn’t. If we manage to plan, we forget to work the plan, revise it, review it, keep assumptions where we can see them, and of course change the plan as reality reveals itself.

As I read on, I saw a recipe for working goals into habits that sounds astoundingly close to what I’ve been saying about business planning (that’s planning, of course, not just plan). Here are the details (as direct quote):

It’s a pretty simple process, but let’s go over it step-by-step:

1. You goal should be written out very clearly. The better you can visualize your goal, the easier this will be.
2. Think about the steps needed to get to your goal. There may be many.
3. Can the goal be accomplished with a series (2-4) of daily or weekly actions? For example, to save money, you will need to make a savings deposit every payday, before you pay your bills. Through that regular action, the goal will eventually be accomplished. Figure this out, and that’s your habit or series of habits.
4. Figure out the amount of the habit will need to be done to get you to your goal by your timeline. By ‘amount’, I mean that you have to figure out quantity times frequency to get your desired result. For example, I can run every single day but not be prepared to run a marathon if I don’t do enough miles or long runs. So if I’m going to run every day, I have to also know how far (and any other things such as different workouts on different days). If I’m going to have a savings deposit every week, I need to know how much is necessary for each deposit in order to reach my goal. Figure out this ‘amount’ for your habit and make a schedule.
5. Focus on the first habit for at least one month, to the exclusion of all else. Don’t worry about the other two habits (for example) while you’re trying to form the first habit. For more on forming habits, this article is good place to start.
6. If more than one habit is necessary, start on the second habit after a month or so, then on the third, and so on, focusing on one habit at a time until each is firmly ingrained.
7. After all the necessary habits are ingrained, your goal is on autopilot. You will still need to focus on them somewhat, but to a lesser extent. If any of the habits gets derailed, you’ll have to focus on that habit again for one month.
8. After you’re on autopilot, you can focus on a new goal and set of habits.

Does this remind you of good business planning process? I hope so.

Picture yourself in front of a group of 20-30 business owners. They are computer or software resellers, dealers of Progress Software, Autodesk, SolidWorks, or a personal computer manufacturer. They are mostly men in their 40s and 50s. Most of them have been in business for themselves for 10-20 years. Most of them have three or more employees, a few have 25, 50, and one or two 100.

If you ask this group how many of them regularly review their business plans and revise them as needed, roughly 10% of them will raise their hands.

You can explore the details in front of the group. The ones who regularly review their business plans will be the stronger and healthier businesses in the group. If they’ve been around for a while, they’ll be the ones with more employees and more market share. If they’re younger and newer companies, they’ll be the ones with more growth.

You want actual data, numbers, and better yet, names? Yeah, me too. I wish I’d done that but it was enough to run full-day planning seminars, each one took a lot of energy, and there just wasn’t enough bandwidth for me to be managing the seminars and populating a database at the same time.

What I will give you, though, is accumulated experience. When I run one of these seminars I can count on my 10% number enough to take the risk of setting myself up in front of the group, at the beginning of the day, with those people as leaders. Throughout the day I can call on them confidently for comments and details and anecdotes, and they’ll have the right kind of useful responses.

These people are my stars. They don’t all plan the same way, they don’t all have the same process, but they do have process. I can count on them. They get it.

Here’s a concrete example: during part of the seminar I want to illustrate the paradoxes of planning, say "business plans are always wrong." I have my two or three stars in the room and I can be sure of getting a useful response from one of them when I deal with this issue for the group. I’ll ask, "Ralph, Mabel, Mary … what do you say? Why do I say that?" And I’ll get back a response about how they’re wrong because assumptions change, which is why plans need to be kept alive and managed. Or they’ll say something like that.

I don’t like to blithely take risks when I’m in front of a group. This 10% rule, however, has worked consistently for me for years. Now, I realize having a set of numbers to display would be stronger than my anecdotal evidence, but then, so many sets of numbers are flawed anyhow, and give the wrong impression. My people in the seminar aren’t a random sample by any means, so the numbers wouldn’t be statistically valid anyhow.

So who are these people? Starting in the 1980s I did some seminars for Apple Computer dealers in Latin America, and then in the 90s in Japan and Singapore, then HP dealers in different places, then Data General, UNISYS, and more recently for dealers of Autodesk, SolidWorks, and Progress Software.

Does this same 10% apply for other industries? I can’t be sure that my anecdotal data applies; but I’ll bet it does.

– Tim

Professional investor Bijan Sabet received a blog as a business presentation. He suggests it makes sense. "It’s a first for me," he adds. "I actually liked it."

You can read more of the post for a quick view of the navigation involved, and some interesting comments as well.

What I really like about this is it is a concrete example of what I’ve been saying about planning and plans. Form follows function. Business planning is about running a business better and a business plan is not the set-in-stone standard format coil bound quasi-PhD treatise. It doesn’t have a standard outline and a defined format. It better have good market analysis, good focus, good cash flow, and it better have concrete dates, deadlines, budgets, and assigned responsibilities.

I think it will help people get out of the rut,  meaning all these stupid "don’t do a business plan" comments from people who really mean don’t get lost in the document, don’t obsess, don’t do a business plan covering more than you need, and do a business plan as a tool for business management, a plan you’ll track and follow up.

Each year, as you get ready to publish the next year’s plan, schedule the plan review meetings. Use some regular meeting schedule such as the third or fourth Thursday of every month.  All the managers committed to the plan will know way ahead of time so there are few reasons to miss a meeting.

Some excuses will come up. There will be events like trade shows or client events that some managers have to attend. However, with a preplanned schedule for review meetings, these problems won’t happen that often.

If your planning process includes a good plan — with specific responsibilities assigned, managers committed, budgets, dates, and measurability — then the review meetings become easier to manage and easier to attend.  The agenda of each meeting should be predetermined by the milestones coming due soon, and milestones recently due.  Managers review and discuss plan vs. actual results, explain and analyze the differences.

At Palo Alto Software, we review coordinated milestones once a week, Tuesday mornings, in about 20 minutes.  The monthly plan vs. actual review includes financial results and other measurables — product milestones, support calls, sales events, etc. — and takes just two hours a month.

It doesn’t take that much time, but there is very little in management more valuable.  It makes your plan a planning process.

– Tim –

In breakfast, the chicken is involved, the pig is committed.

In the business planning process, commitment is essential. Plans need to be implemented, and implementation means commitment.  There has to be accountability, and peer pressure.  You have to follow up on what was planned to make sure that it was actually carried out. Here are some ways to develop commitment within your team:

• Use the SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to start discussion. SWOT brings team members into the  strategic discussion. It makes strategy understandable. Your managers have to be part of the team that discusses strategy.
• Make the budgeting elements of the planning process visible. Managers should see what their peers are spending and should hear why. One of the best things I ever watched, as a consultant, was a management group that argued over the activity budgets during the planning process. Each manager had to defend his or her budget, showing what sales and marketing budgets would come out of it. There was a lot of peer pressure.
• Make sure people know that actual results will be compared to plan.  With time, in a company that uses the planning process, this becomes second nature.  In the beginning, however, it is extremely important that the main company owners and operators set the standards by scheduling plan review meetings each month and attending them. This has to be important.

The bottom line here is that planning process, for a growing company, is about the people more than the plan. Not only does everything have to be measurable, but it also has to be measured, after the fact, and tracked, and managed. Your people must be committed to your plan.

– Tim