Planning

As the Executives of the organization (Anyone having a significant impact on the decisions and actions effecting the business) you are working with limited resources. These resources include people, technology, capital, buildings, plants and equipment etc..

The more aligned the resources are towards achieving your daily business results and long term goals, the better your chances for sustainable success. The axiom that “people do not plan to fail, but fail to plan” is true. We affix the addition as follows “people do not plan to fail, they fail to plan in a meaningful and sustainable way”.

In other words even if people recognize the need for planning but do it in an ineffectual way, the result can be that resources are deployed in activities that do not align with the strategic objectives of the company. The deployment of the right planning methods creates alignment between your objectives and insures that your resources and projects are working on the activities that have the highest impact in the right order.

If you are looking for a company that will do "Event Strategy" and "look in" on how you're doing every once in awhile we thank you for interest thus far but we are probably not a match for you. The issue isn’t whether or not to plan; it is how meaningful our planning is and how deep and broad our planning needs to be based on where you are today and where you would like to be tomorrow.

Many companies do not need the formalized processes and sophisticated integrations that many would have them believe and on the other side many need a far better method and framework for planning than they have.

Why Does This Occur and What Can We Do Differently?

There are two primary issues. These are not just academic, they are real whether you run a small 1-2 person operation or one with thousands with a holding company and multiple businesses and divisions. The conversation about the speed of change, while worked over repeatedly, is why changing our planning ability and incorporating the right processes and tools are critical to the success of your organization today. The same reasons that business is more complex also gives us the tools to manage the complexity. We just aren't good at using and implementing them yet.

These two primary issues are "Complexity" and "Knowledge Integration Shift" have been brought about by our change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Both are described below but the bottom line is this... It's all about what happens where your company meets the customer.

The successful business of today and those that will earn the right to do business three years from now will require that thinking, knowledge and internal communications change substantially using the new tools and methods. Winning companies will use the same tools and environmental changes that created all of this speed and complexity... to manage it.

Circulatory Strategies recognizes the new complexities;
Higher velocity - The speed of change in markets (many global), competition, products and services.
Increased customer expectations - Customers expect more for less, faster service, and better quality products and/or services.
Greater requirements for efficiency - The world requires more done for less. Technology integrations and refined processes maintain pressure on your cost to produce.
Replication - Newer entrants frequently means faster, better as products and services are more easily replicable.
Faster opportunity recognition - As market opportunities are identified new entrants fill the gap quickly often able to deploy the best-of-class people, processes and technologies while existing players deal with legacy issues.

The issue isn’t whether or not to plan; it is how meaningful our planning is and how deep and broad our planning needs to be based on where your company is today and where you would like to be tomorrow.

Many people do not need the formalized processes and sophisticated integrations that many would have them believe and on the other side many frankly need a far better method and framework for planning than they have.

What Can We Do Differently?

Thinking at the top and implementing Standard Operating Procedures and Rules used to be sufficient to compete in the old business model (Industrial Age). They are completely insufficient in today's Information Age business model.

Knowing the organizational direction and goals, understanding the customers situation and goals and finding the solutions that match them, takes the full power of creating direction, aligning resources, communicating them to every point in the organization, getting feedback on the results and adjusting based on those results. Circulatory Strategic Management®.