Planning and Paradox

Business planning is full of paradox. Here are some interesting examples.

• Business plans are always wrong, but nonetheless vital. Wrong because they're predicting the future and we're human, we're fallible, so we don't get it right. Vital because we need the plan in order to track where, how, and what direction it was wrong, which becomes planning process, which becomes management. I deal with this a lot, so it just came up at my eBay presentation last Thursday.  I talked about this in this interview with Webpronews, at eBay, right after.


• You have to focus to survive, but you need new markets to grow. So which is it? Have you heard of the corridor principal? It says business strategy is like walking down a long corridor full of doors. Open every door to investigate and you never get anywhere. Ignore all the doors to just keep going and you never get any new opportunities.


• I say in my Hurdle: the Book on Business Planning: "Strategy Needs to be Consistently Applied Over a Long Term to Work. Better to have a mediocre long-term strategy consistently applied for years than a series of brilliant but contradictory strategies that never last long enough to matter." So do you stick to the plan regardless, like running into a brick wall? Or do you revise? When do you revise? How do you know? There's paradox, where the human judgment comes in to override the formulaic.

--Tim