By George McQuain
General George S. Patton said two very important things
relating to strategic planning (or any time of planning for that matter). They
were “Until it's executed, a plan is only a plan” and “A good plan aggressively
executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”
I then took my questionnaire and snail mailed it (this was
back in the days before the earth’s crust had hardened and Email was invented) to
the head of strategic planning at large number of U.S.-based large companies.
While I was waiting for the responses to my survey to be
returned to me, I classified all the companies by industry group and began
evaluating the responding company’s financial (Net Income, Cash Flow, ROI) and
market (sales growth, estimated market share growth) results. I then correlated
the sophistication of the planning process of the responding companies against their
performance.
My research seemed to bear witness to something General
Norman Schwarzkopf said: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the
right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”
What I found was that there was a negative correlation
between the sophistication of a company’s planning process and their
performance and a positive correlation between their execution process and the
company’s performance. In other words, having a great “plan” didn’t translate
into great performance, executing your plan did.
As Peter Drucker said "It is meaningless to speak of
short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today -
and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that
talk about action tomorrow - they are dreams, if not pretexts for non-thinking,
non-planning, non-doing."
While all of this may seem obvious, according to Kaplan and Norton, the originators of the Balance Scorecard, 90% of companies fail to successfully implement their strategies. So, while it may be obvious, a lot of people/organizations are having "issues" here. More on this phenomena in my next blog.
While all of this may seem obvious, according to Kaplan and Norton, the originators of the Balance Scorecard, 90% of companies fail to successfully implement their strategies. So, while it may be obvious, a lot of people/organizations are having "issues" here. More on this phenomena in my next blog.