Summer is here and in addition to the rush of vacations and beach time, most major corporations are spending a couple of months building the plan for next year. The irony of this rite of summer cannot escape comment.

The drill is usually that in June or July a plan is put together that includes revenues, costs, headcounts, programs, and initiatives sharing a PowerPoint deck with a healthy dose of goals, strategies, and tactics. All this intense and sometimes overwhelming activity builds a plan that will start in 6 months and set the stage for everything that will happen through the end of 2007.

My problem starts with a statement or two, buried somewhere in the strategies, that the company will become more agile, more responsive to customers, build products faster, and drive those pesky competitors into the ground.

Since smaller and more agile competitors can take Internet products to market in weeks and deliver complete products in a few months, how ironic is it - how vain is it - that anyone today who believes that competition is key and agility is omniportant would kid themselves by building a detailed plan that looks forward 18 months?

It's all an illusion. These monster plans don't control reality. Instead companies could better spend their time by setting broad goals and directions to direct small, clearly-purposed and proactive teams that can act just like those smaller competitors. Competitors that are out to insure that the big-business master plan will simply never happen.
 

Home | Privacy