Tomorrow, Tomorrow,Tomorrow. Planning Can’t Wait, Do it NOW!

Note:  When I was in college postage was cheap, long distance telephone calls were expensive and e-mail hadn't been invented.  I can remember being caught in a conundrum trying to communicate with the folks back home.  Seemed like every time I sat down to write a letter, the time wasn't right.  There was something pending and I wanted to wait until it materializd so I could send on results, not anticipation... be it about a test or the outcome of a game.  I quickly learned a lesson that is the subject of this post:  if you wait for just the right moment to do anything, the opportunity may pass you by altogether.  Here's what I wrote a few years ago in one of my newsletter - with a couple of updated thoughts.

Now’s not the right time, is the most common reason I’m given in delaying the start of planning. Managers find themselves too busy because times are good or times are bad. As reasonable as the argument sounds it is a dangerous fallacy and following it only guarantees you’ll pay the cost of being unprepared for the future when it arrives. Keep in mind, the future is tomorrow.

The fact is, there is never a good moment to do planning, it always takes an inconvenient investment of time and energy. No one wants to stop when every thing is going well; no one will stop when success seems to be slipping away.

In this note I.ll point out some of the ways in which planning can be done more conveniently and provide some counsel as to how to handle the inherent distractions and costs of trying to build a plan while

continuing to deal with day to day issues.

Planning When Times are Good

There’s a strong case that growing organizations need planning most of all, because they are finally generating enough resources to present managers with strategic options. Without some planning profits can be wasted through inattention or, worse, squandered away through unthinking expenditure. A plan assures any extra nickels at the end of the day are invested wisely in enterprises that strengthen the organization’s position.

It’s hard to plan when things are going well because managers and staff are working hard to gather as much as they can while they can. During these growth spurts it makes sense to design a planning effort that places minimal demands on people. It is alright to delegate planning to a single person as long as that person gives everyone a chance to review the plan. Using a consultant may ease the burden, too.

The risk is that organizations without a plan will not get the most out of their profits and end up unprepared for the new challenges when they come.

Start up companies face a particualr challenge in terms of finding time to plan.  In its earliest stages a new organization is often running as fast as it can to deal with everything growth throws at them.  When things start to take off the daily pressure to meet demands that were never there beforre can exhaust start-up managers.   These companies, more than any, need to take a day every now and then and catch breath and update their plan.   The military uses the concept of "stand down" days... all but maintenance activity stops for a day, and everyone else focuses on what's working and what's not.  A moment for refelction is often worth months of future success.

Planning during Hard Times

Action, any action, would seem the best way to keep going when survival is on the line, but it’s not the best strategy. A better approach is to plan an organization out of trouble. Making just the right decisions in the correct order is the only way to stop a downward spiral. Planning allows for the kind of analysis than can separate symptom from illness, temporary fix from long-term cure.

Again this may not be a good time to engage everyone - they have plenty to so during the crisis - but one person, probably with the help of the consultant can put together a plan that gets past survival to recovery and renewed growth. Make sure everyone reviews it and you should be okay.

There are plenty of examples of organizations that used difficult economic times, much like today’s, to refocus and retool so that when the turn-around did come they shot ahead of their competitors who were preoccupied with current conditions.

When is the Best Time to Plan?

Most organizations operate in cyclical environments. Nothing rises forever and few things fall eternally.  Good planning takes the highs and lows of organizational or economic cycles into account.

The best moment to plan is just before a cyclical shift up or down. Boaters will recognize this as a slack tide that precedes the rush of ebbs and flows.

Planning then assures the organization is poised to enter a new phase with a plan ready to deal with the changes the future brings.

Strategically the trick is to extend upward momentum, to get a longer ride on the wave, or to shorten the downturn and reverse or reduce the slide. In either case, the organization is prepared to take advantage of a prosperous future or temper the impact of a tough one. Great success awaits the organization ready to reap the benefits of good times when they return.

Planning takes time, but in the long run it saves time because future decisions are surer, clearer and swifter. There is no getting around the inconvenience of planning; it always comes when you are busy. The effort, however, is rewarded in a somewhat

predictable, more controllable future.

The Strategic Gourmand: A Tasty Summer Drink from Across the Pond

When you live in the Pacific Northwest you come to appreciate the summer and the sunny days and long evenings. The maddening damp from late October to mid-April is made tolerable by nearly 18 hours of daylight in summer.

The Brits understand this. That’s why the coming of summer is met with a wonderful drink, the Pimm’s Cup. Altogether unknown in the US (as it the liqueur that fuels it) this is a beverage that will make any summer day just a little sunnier.

Pimm’s is the trademark for a spirit (specifically Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, even though it’s in a bottle) that as best I can figure it out is a spiced brandied gin. By itself it’s a nice aperitif. In the cup, mixed with ginger ale it is a snappy base for the cocktail.

It’s a staple in London pubs and throughout southern England in the summer, think of it as England’s marguerita. It’s easy to mix, easy to drink and it will put you on your behind if you don’t watch out… Pimms is 25% alcohol by volume.

Take a tall glass, fill with ice-cubes. Pour about a 1/3 of a glass Pimms and fill the rest with lemonade or ginger ale. The garnish is important here… lemon and a long stalk of celery are preferred. The adventurous might go for a carrot or asparagus I guess, but the celery adds a clean taste to clear your palate for the next one.

Pimms, by the way, makes an interesting mix with gin. One way or another, drink enough Pimms and you’ll need you sunglasses.

Things I Wish I’d Said and Why

I Wish I’d Said This:

In Carol De Giere’s biography of composer and lyricist, Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Wicked) on getting started: I tend to follow the “path of least resistance,” rather than trying to write sequentially. When starting the score for a show, I tend to start with the song that seems easiest to me, the one that comes most naturally. Often, it’s trying to get at the emotional or philosophical center of the story… but not always. It’s most important just to open the door and step into the show somewhere. (Defying Gravity, p. 299)

Why?

Schwartz captures an important principle here, planning is hard enough without having to make it harder by taking on the toughest pieces first. What he expresses is a keen sense of priority. Something’s have to be done right away. They are so critical to the organization’s sustained fulfillment of its mission there is no choice. Most of us can figure that one out as priority number one. What next? Finding the “dunk shots,” or “low hanging fruit,” is smart strategic planning. Just getting started is reassuring; getting quick results is motivating (and the perfect antidote to skepticism and cynicism). I look at the easy ones as portals, their early achievement opens the door to getting started on other objectives.

Getting More out of Strategic Planning Part 4 (Final Installment)

Along with the unexpected consequences of improved leadership and management, simply doing strategic planning tends to boost employee commitment (and in associations, member involvement). This beneficial outcome occurs because of two things: the manner in which employees and members are engaged in the planning process and from the focus the plan brings to everyday operations.

A correctly facilitated strategic planning process should use a team that engages the whole of an organization, not just executive and board leadership. Not only is the perspective from on the ground needed, involving the folks who will do much of the plan’s implementation assures it actually gets done and with buy-in. As referenced in my last post, it’s easier to get buy-in before the fact than to sell an idea after the fact. I’ve seen disasters averted and shortcuts discovered because an employee or member well down in the hierarchy, by part of the planning team, could see what was going to happen.

Planning provides a focus that make most people’s work easier… often linking apparently disparate acts into a whole unified by the organization’s mission. People want to feel part of something and the clear mission and compelling vision spelled out in the strategic plan creates the foundation for a community.

To see the Powerpoint presentation I used at NAR follow this link: http://pnwconsult.com/NAR DC 2009 VO.pptx or http://pnwconsult.com/NAR Midyear 2009.ppt

Getting the Most out of Strategic Planning, Part 3

Along with the benefits of better leadership strategic planning’s need for a clear mission and performance measures has a direct, positive, impact on the management of organizations. The focus provided by a strategic plan comes from the clarity found in the organization’s mission… not some flowery, Dilbertesque string of platitudes and bureaujargon, but a simple declarative sentence of what the organization must do and must get for those efforts. It’s no accident that most strategic planning facilitators begin by writing a mission statement, because everything in an organization begins and ends there.

Having worked through dozens of such statements, and sharing the frustration that participants do at the constant word-smithing and hair-splitting consistent with the exercise, I discovered folks were making it too hard. And in the process robbing their organizations of the focus a good mission should provide. I spent some time analyzing mission statements and came to the conclusion that the best ones were nothing more than do-get declarations. I have often cited, although I’ve never found it written anywhere, a mission attributed to Alfred P. Sloan when he became President of General Motors in 1923. Supposedly surveying the diversified GM empire he said, “We bend metal for profit.”

Pretty straightforward stuff: noun, verb, object. The beauty of such clear thinking is that it leads to clear action so that anyone at GM, CEO to the person sweeping out the factory after the shift, gets it: his or her job is to make that mission happen. It worked so well GM was, until recently, the model of the superiorly managed corporation. I know your’re curious. GM’s contemporary mission statement:

G.M. is a multinational corporation engaged in socially responsible operations, worldwide. It is dedicated to provide products and services of such quality that our customers will receive superior value while our employees and business partners will share in our success and our stock-holders will receive a sustained superior return on their investment."

The current mission seems accurate and detailed next to Sloan's, but it lacks a more important property: clarity. Sloan's is a rallying point, what I like to call the "north star" of the organization, a point of reference that instantaneously tells everyone who you are and what you are about. This allows, as Tom Peters once put it, for folks to "stick to the knitting."

A well done mission statement doesn’t have to be as linear as Sloan’s I like the one I did for General Parts, Inc. a few years ago: we distribute and sell auto parts for the benefit of the customer, our employees and our shareholders. Same idea.

Conceived of in this manner, the mission statement lays the foundation for the powerful management device of performance measurement. As a simple proclamation of what an organizations does and what is expected from those efforts the mission provides what, using the technical language of performance measurement, is needed to determine whether efforts produce results, definitions of both outputs and outcomes.

For many organizations this is a huge step forward and a signal effort towards holding an organization accountable… not for just what it does, but for what it achieves. Such thinking leads quickly to the idea of an organizational report card or, as Kaplan and Norton put it, a balanced scorecard. To their thinking any organization really has four bottom lines to attend to: financial outcomes, customer satisfaction, organizational capacity (internal business practices) and the adequacy of its knowledge base (this latter equating with organizational intelligence).

An organization that can measure, monitor and manage itself with these four general performance standards in mind is going to be strong… rooted in its commitment to meet customer needs, cognizant of financial imperatives for sustainability and profit, aware of a need to grow, improve and to learn.

The unfortunate thing is the development of performance measures is often skipped in the strategic planning process. Identifying them is difficult and, for the uninitiated, time-consuming especially when there are a lot of other things to do. Over-looking this step, however, compromises the plan and assures confusion as to where an organization is going and whether it ever gets there. The sad truth is that most CEOs have cars in the corporate parking lot with more instruments on the dashboard than they have performance measures in the board room.

Once measures are identified it is possible to track organizational performance over time. The first year of measurement establishes a baseline against which every succeeding year can be compared. Similarly, performance can be benchmarked against other organizations. These are effective ways of determining whether goals are being achieved as well as allowing for analyses of “gaps” to set future performance goals.

The fundamental impact of the introduction of performance measurement as a management tool is to shift the organization’s analysis and thinking from opinion and myth to data and fact. While care needs to be taken to assure the validity of these measurements and their application, their use to inform management decisions can be transformative.

To see the Powerpoint presentation I used at NAR follow these links: http://pnwconsult.com/NAR DC 2009 VO.pptx or http://pnwconsult.com/NAR Midyear 2009.ppt

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You Can Look it Up: Some Thoughts on Baseball

There's just no way I can talk over any period of time and not get around to baseball. It has been a passion since I was 8 and today still represents a major interest… all of it, the game, the history, the statistics, the physical activity. Tom Boswell used to speak of the "flash of the green," that first glimpse of the field seen as you enter a stadium tunnel: so full of promise, so inviting. Baseball has been a pastime, both active and passive, and a metaphor for a lot of things in my life. Not a day passes, at least from the start of spring training in February to World Series' final out, that doesn't find me thinking about it.

I grew up a Dodger fan. They abandoned Brooklyn but liberated southern California when I was in the 8^th grade. Somehow I'd already become addicted to the game, following from the west coast the exploits of the Cincinnati Reds and my hero Ted Kluszewski starting a couple of years earlier. The arrival of the Dodgers three years later was truly a dream come true.

June 28, 1959 (exactly 14 years to the day my son Matt was born) marks the moment of the first major league baseball game I'd ever seen. By then, an aging Big Klu had been traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Although he didn't play that day (another poor managerial decision by skipper Danny Murtaugh) I did see him hit a ball out during BP. I failed to get his autograph after the game; he rebuffed me with a "get away, kid" and boarded the team bus. He wore a shiny green silk suit and clamped the biggest cigar I have ever seen in his mouth. My mother never forgave him, but he remained a God in my mind.

Later, now residing in the Pacific Northwest, my allegiance… suffering allegiance I should say… shifted to the Seattle Mariners. The one-year wonder Pilots preceded them and I may belong to a very small club of people who have attended every opening day of major league baseball in Seattle, starting with the Pilots in 1969, then picking up again with the Ms in 1977. Sicks Stadium to the Kingdome to Safeco… with a few notable exceptions I've seen a lot of mediocre baseball.

If I'm not mistaken, the Mariners are the oldest franchise to never make a World Series appearance and several that came into existence with or after them have: Toronto, Florida and, most recently, Tampa. Perhaps not as long-suffering as the Red Sox fans were or the Cub fans are, but still pretty sufferable. But like all dedicated Mariner followers, I'll always have 1995 and 2001… soooo close.

Today the Ms are still in recovery. The loss of Lou Pinella as manager and the unproductive reign of Bill Bavasi as General Manager brought us to where we are today: a slightly less than .500 club. Don Wakamatsu, the new manager and the new GM Jack Zduriencik have made some good moves, but the years of neglect have dulled the need to win and the failed the instill the hatred of loss that propelled the Pinella teams.

As much as I find little to support my dreams in this current Mariner teams, unlike many, I'm not in despair about the game in general. The discovery of widespread use of steroids over the last 20 years certainly taints the records and character of many of the players. But I never held baseball players on a particularly high moral pedestal anyway… at least not after being shoved aside by Kluszewski.

Baseball players were among the first professional athletes, an accomplishment regretted by many purists at the time when amateur athletics was looked at as a virtue. No one under the age of 50 can remember what a non-commercialized and subsidized Olympics looked like, but there was really a time when we glorified those who competed for the love of the game. Baseball players were already tainted when the game became an industry in the late 19^th century. They were money-grubbing, hard-drinking, tobacco-spitting, rough and tumble players. The Black Sox scandal on 1919 was an unsurprising result of many seasons of dirty baseball and marginal on-the-field ethics. It was, is and probably always will be a game of cheaters.

Today we look at the exploits of Ty Cobb or the excesses of Babe Ruth as though they are examples of a by-gone, gladly departed age. Nope. A-rod and Clemens are born of the same lineage and they and many of their peers will do just about anything to win. While Alex Rodriguez closes in on Aaron's all time home-run record (the pursuit abandoned by Barry Bonds as he struggles with his own performance-enhanced shame) I have to be fair. I have a pretty good idea what chemical fueled his taters. I have a suspicion Babe Ruth had his own enhancers and maybe even the mythical Aaron did, too. Maybe Babe's beer and hot dogs, while legal, kept him loose enough to hit them out of the intentionally designed short porch of right field in Yankee Stadium. As honorable as Aaron is, I can't believe that he didn't make use of the pharmacy of pain-killers and cortisone discovered and freely prescribed in the 1950s and 60s, which while legal, helped him keep playing until he was 42.

What the 19^th century purists detested about professional sports has pretty much come to pass. They could never have imagined the greed, addiction, cheating and debauchery that came with a paycheck, but they had an idea that sport itself would be transformed in some undesirable way.

I'm not turning a blind eye here. I never attached heroic status to the players and owners. But the sheer beauty of the game, the brilliance of skill required to play it and the inherent drama of two evenly matched players, pitcher and batter, is as compelling to me today as it was to me as a kid.

I was reminded of this last night. My 7-year old grand-daughter Larkin is playing her first season of baseball. Yesterday was team photo night for the Fircrest Giants. She's got a good hitting eye and is a real ball hawk. She's getting the game inside of her. The real game. She has no idea who A-rod is and couldn't care less.

While the kids were playing catch and running around I heard the unmistakable sound any baseball fan loves: solid contact of a bat on ball. I looked over. A local beer league softball team was practicing and the guy at the plate had power. He was really ripping ball. Long looping fly balls and screaming line drives. There was no sophistication in his hitting at all. He was strong with good reflexes… a righty - everything he hit was pulled to left field. His cut-off sleeves brought by memories of Klu.

And oh how that ball rose in the twilight. It looked like it would go on forever.

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Taking Strategic Planning to the Next Level, Part 2

In my comments to the folks attending the National Association of REALTORS(r) Midyear Conference last Friday, I tried to elevate thinking about strategic planning. I wanted to get beyond the usual recitations of the cookbook techniques (or to my credit, I think) a pitch for my services. My aim was to shed light on some of the more nuanced benefits that come from planning.

The first “unexpected outcome” I talked about was the impact the planning process has on the continuity and consistency of leadership. This issue is of particularly relevance to associations, most of which have a unique governance structure not found in business or government. The leadership of associations is generally based on a partnership between an elected President who, as a member, volunteers to serve and a professional association executive who is hired to manage.

It is most common for the elected leadership to change annually, although most REALTOR® associations ask a three year commitment as the elected leader “works through the chairs", first vice president, president-elect to president. Associations execs (AEs or EOs) continue in their roles as long as the association board allows.

There is a kind of majesty and lunacy to this model. Elected leadership changes frequently, guaranteeing fresh ideas and a sense of urgency to the roles… strong associations are good examples of representative democracy. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the constant turn-over in leadership can results in a series of disconnected and unrelated presidential initiatives… at worst, flights of ego-driven fancy reminiscent of Roman emperors.

In most cases what presidents want to achieve in their year of leadership is consistent with what the association is trying to accomplish in the long run. But more often than I would like, well-intentioned presidential goals distract from the strategic plan or, occasionally, actually subvert the association’s long term goals.

AEs walk a narrow tightrope trying to strike just the right balance between honoring this year’s presidential passion with the on-going strategic initiatives. A well done strategic planning process can do much to generate consistency and continuity in the tumultuous world of association governance.

The idea is pretty simple: use the plan to channel presidential interest. If the plan focuses on a sustained effort to involve new members, wed the incoming President’s interest in education to an objective to start a new or revised member orientation program. Plan focuses on cutting costs? Tap the new President’s passion for the affiliate members to look at ways to develop strategic financial alliances. If the plan focuses on improving the profession’s public image, use the President’s interest in getting a foundation started is a perfect way to link those two ideas.

Done correctly, annual Presidential initiatives flow into and reinforce the association’s three year plan. Even better, leadership teams have an ability to support and advance each others annual agenda long after a President is out of office.

If the association is organized along a set of progressive chairs – usually First VP, President-Elect, President and Past President – it is possible to create a span of seven years. It works like this: assume the current President started as First VP in 2006. In the system I describe in 2006 she would have been introduced to the initiative promoted by the Past President three years earlier in 2003. By the time she becomes Past President in 2010, she’ll get to know the 2010 First VP who will pursue his Presidential agenda in 2012. Sorry for the numbing numbers, but add it up… there is a direct link between 2003 and 2102.

The key here is to honor both the passion of the association President with the focus of the association plan. It can be done with results that reinforce and supplement the strategic plan.

To see the Powerpoint presentation I used at NAR follow this link: http://pnwconsult.com/NAR DC 2009 VO.pptx or http://pnwconsult.com/NAR Midyear 2009.ppt

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