Useless Plans
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless...”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Your Brilliant, Useless Plan: You’ve spent weeks and weeks honing your annual plan. You built it on deep consumer, shopper and customer insight and incorporated brilliant new creative to differentiate your brand. You integrated it across all consumer/shopper touch points and accounted for competitive response and contingencies. You iterated through feedback from stakeholders across the organization. And you negotiated your way to a reasonable balance of fiscal prudence and aggressive growth.
And Ike says it’s all useless?
Unfortunately, plans are even more useless today than when Eisenhower uttered those words. Today’s dynamic markets, changing consumer needs and wants, evolving retailer demands and perpetual competitive escalation make your plan obsolete just about the time management sees the last PowerPoint slide.
But General Eisenhower had to have plans to work with the Allies to defeat Hitler, didn’t he?
Yes, he had plans, but he understood where their value lied, as indicated by the complete quote:
“In preparing or battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
All that effort to develop the killer plan need not be wasted, as long as you don’t regard it as the immutable brand success formula from on high. All your best practices from analysis of the last 6-12 months may be obsolete next month with one key competitive or customer action.
Planning for battle If you view it as not just a plan, but planning—preparation for battle—then you will be in position to nimbly navigate the unknown landscape, no matter what landmines your competitors, customers or consumers lay.
To be prepared for battle, you have to amplify the underlying insights, principles and building blocks of your plan into flexible guard rails and stories that can guide those that are closest to the action. To extend the value of their planning across the organization and over the year, the best companies have internalized practices like these:
Engage broad team in planning process for built-in alignment
Conduct competitive gaming exercise to broaden thinking
Focus on “guiding principles” more than “gold standards”
Translate key elements into concise stories for broader circulation
Train and incent those close to the market to apply the planning
Create dialogue mechanism for market feedback to guide broader team
The businesses that convert their planning to fast and accurate marketplace decisions are better positioned to respond to their dynamic environment and perpetually challenge for leadership. At Knowledge Amp, we love helping organizations make sure that all those hours of strategic planning become indispensable…and lead to marketplace victory.
To learn more, call Bob Hilarides at 847 917 5121 or visit www.KnowledgeAmp.com.
