Strategic Planning: The Five
Critical Considerations That
Can Help Your Plan Succeed
T
his chapter presents five critical issues to consider when build-
ing your business plan and constructing the accompanying
story. Stories fail when these issues become traps or pitfalls. This
chapter presents the issues and offers concrete examples of how to
avoid the pitfalls. These issues have to do with:
57
CHAPTER
3
1. How management theories shape your business behavior
2. Your attitude toward planning
3. The effects of time on your story
4. Guidance from which you build a business plan
5. Assumptions you make to construct a successful plan
You must meet and deal with all five considerations for a suc-
cessful story. The absence of any one piece creates a hole in the
planning model and makes your story incongruent.
The first issue is your understanding of the roots of our busi-
ness models. As managers and leaders, we have centuries of busi-
ness thinking embedded into our psyches. That thinking is based
on a model now considered obsolete or at least under suspicion. A
completely new way of viewing the world has opened our thinking
about the leadership of people and the management of companies.
In a nutshell, every business model we know is up for review.
Concepts once held dear, like the span of control of five to seven
people, are now being questioned. The traditional chain of com-
mand is being replaced with other ways of thinking. Rigid organi-
zational structures, once thought to be permanent, are being

What guesses are you making about the future? Assumptions are
those things you believe to be true that affect your plan if changed
over time. The more accurate your assumptions, the more definitive
your plans become. Your plan fails if your assumptions are grossly
off the mark. The validity of your story is also questionable if your
assumptions don’t make sense. This creates a problem of congru-
ence, authenticity, and believability.
H
OW TO
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MBRACE THE
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AST
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HANGING
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AWS
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USINESS
U
NIVERSE
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OMPANY
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are experiencing modern times calling for modern management. In
fact, every model we are using is subject to being questioned in
light of applicability. Therefore, we may make the following obser-
vations:
■ Traditional models are not bad—they just don’t work as
well anymore.
■ Every business model we learned is shifting.
■ Every model is therefore suspect.
Lurking in the background has been a competing theory of
how businesses should be led and managed. Events, circumstances,
and the nature of the evolving fundamental processes of society
have brought the competing theories into vogue. Now you are
being asked to look at your business from a shifted point of view.
Concepts such as self-directed work teams, empowerment, and
shared decision making are terms frequently found in your business
meetings. Instead of just making things you are now being asked to
put your customers’ needs in the center of the ring and respond
accordingly.
Consumers take quality as a given, want the product yesterday,
and expect to pay less and less. The Henry Ford quote, “Any color you
want, so long as it’s black,” worked well for his time but wouldn’t
survive till the sun goes down in view of this shift in management
thinking.
2
No area of business is protected from the effects of the shifting
business models. Areas once considered safe are the focus of atten-
tion. Consider services being outsourced as a prime example of the
shift from owning everything to paying for services as needed.
That’s what the whole outsourcing movement is about. Think of
typical company staff functions such as human resources, informa-

ory of people. Do you see people as part of a big machine
or as a valuable resource? For example, do employees need
to be involved in planning, or can the management team
just tell them what to do?
2.
Challenge every concept you have about customers. Are cus-
tomers and their inherent complaints a necessary part of
doing business, or are they the key to your existence? For
example, when do you consider the customer’s needs and
wants in your product development? Traditionally we
asked the customer’s opinion last when developing a new
product. In the new models of the business future, cus-
tomers will be at the center of the equation.
3.
Challenge your internal time orientation. Customers are
demanding goods and services in real time. Are you pre-
pared to operate on a next-day-delivery concept? Is your
model of the world still “Please allow four to six weeks for
delivery”? FedEx and the other overnight-delivery services
Seven Steps to a Successful Business Plan
62
have rethought, redesigned, and reoriented the time
issues.
4.
Challenge the roles and functions of your organization. How
can you redefine roles to make them more challenging?
For example, examine your organization’s structure. Can
you get more done through strategic partnerships and
outsourcing?
B

changes to its behavior, fine-tunes its existing story, and polishes
old behaviors. The arrogant company, on the other hand, refuses to
believe the water is heating up. After all, it’s in control of the ther-
mostat. Let’s examine in more detail how both types of companies
refuse to examine their internal thinking.
Timid Companies: Thinking Small and Failing to
Take Risks
The story of timid companies is marked by a failure to live up to
their fullest potential. They build stories behind an elaborate set of
excuses designed to keep the company in the middle of the road,
never venturing too far to either side. Managers of timid companies
are not bad people. They don’t set out to be average; they are just
not the risk takers of the business world.
Strategic Planning
63
Most organizations are successful to some degree in spite of
their management, not because of its behavior. Managers in timid
companies get in the way of their own success because they tend to
think small, stay in a low-performance comfort zone, and avoid
risks. This mediocre behavior is generally acceptable in the average
American corporation where the “industry average” is the perfor-
mance benchmark. If an industry average growth is 10 percent, a
timid company is satisfied with getting close to that mark. Their
story at year’s end is a glowing admission of limited thinking.
Praises and self-congratulations are made for setting and meeting
average performance goals. Such self-limiting behavior creates
mediocre management.
Thinking small is an extremely limiting managerial behavior.
With few exceptions, most managers today are trained with a num-
bers mentality that leads to thinking inside a box. Words such as

so many people were in the game. While writing this chapter, I
decided to check out my suspicions on credit cards. I wanted to see
if the fad had passed. For a one-month period we kept a few unso-
licited cards that came into our office. Here is what we received
(and this list doesn’t even include the many phone calls we had for
the same service):
■ Orvis Conservation Platinum Visa Card
■ NRA MasterCard
■ FCC National Bank Gold MasterCard
■ FCC National Bank First Card Platinum Visa
■ American Express Small Business Services Corporate
Option Platinum
■ City Bank & US Airways Platinum Visa
I guess these are businesses that think the card business might be a
worthy venture after all.
Thinking small also encourages another destructive behavior.
Being conservative is safe, comfortable, and attracts little attention
to poor individual performance. Using team-generated, conserva-
tive numbers makes it easy for an average performer to hide in the
management crowd. With the current emphasis on using teams, it
becomes easy for group dynamics to become a screen for limited
individual thinking. Bold thinkers stand out in a crowd where the
group norm is a safe, conservative approach to business goals.
Average thinkers also hide in that same crowd. But the blame for
misusing a group doesn’t just rest on the individual. Much of it can
Strategic Planning
65
be linked to the training and skills of those responsible for creating
and leading those management teams.
Seldom do senior managers have the necessary sophisticated

plan. That’s arrogance pure and simple. Sadly, the reasons for arro-
gant companies to avoid planning won’t withstand close scrutiny.
Seven Steps to a Successful Business Plan
66
A company that doesn’t plan can operate for a period of time, exist-
ing day to day or year to year, but sooner or later the story plays
out.
Arrogant leaders of arrogant companies often use three com-
mon themes or reasons to skip writing a business plan. These dead-
ly avoidance behaviors are made even more potent when found in
combinations:
1.
When life is good customers line up and profits roll in with no
end in sight.
“Why should we do strategic planning?” a
successful management team asks. The more profitable a
company, the more arrogant it becomes. Managers begin
to believe their own press clippings, which leads to a belief
of infallibility. Arrogant companies are so busy making
money they get lulled into a false sense of security. They
don’t believe they need to do strategic planning.
Ironically, the best time to plan is when you are making
lots of money and having a string of successes. Then you
can afford the luxury of planning. When you are failing is
the worst time to plan. That’s when you can least afford it.
Either way, the need for planning doesn’t disappear.
2.
We’re good. Arrogant companies have a distorted view of
themselves as successful management teams. They falsely
believe their successes are because of their astute perfor-