Can we really change the world of strategy and business planning?
A few months back at TechCrunch 50, the launch pad for many newly minted startups, there were a few people who asked "are these new companies really trying to change the world?". This was in response to what seemed to be a less exciting group of presenting companies than in past years, in particular Sarah Lacy posed the issue below:
Memo to Start-ups: You’re Supposed to Be Changing the World, Remember?I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world.
A comment that we really liked was:
A start-up's only edge is that it's not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.
When we started RapidInfluence we did so as many people do, because we saw a problem in the market that had affected us and we thought we could do it better by a wide margin. Now the real question was could we move the ball forward in a significant way, a notion that Tim O'Reilly pointed out in a recent video interview, in which he said he is not interested in companies that are making only minor changes to markets or problems.
In our case, the fact of the matter was that people have been consulting on strategy and business planning as well as implementation for decades but as we pointed out in a previous post - Strategic planning is boring .... exciting .... useless .... essential - the whole idea can send shivers down the spine of even the most experienced business person so much so that a large percentage of strategic and business plans actually fail, wow! if that is not a market ripe for change then nothing is.
So, what does it mean to change the world? Well, there are probably some general things that could make something world changing. BTW, I've always disliked the use of the word "world" in this context because of the chance for hyperbole but let's just say that the world really means the arena in which you are working in. So, the criteria or metrics might be:
- There is a radical change in how something is done - Zipcar comes to mind for car rentals, you walk up the street, get in the car drive it around for a few hours then take it back to where you found it and you pay an hourly rate that includes everything, no fuss no muss, not your typical car rental experience
- There is a radical change in the outcome - everyone's favorite Twitter is another example, people have used various forms of messaging for as long as the Internet has been in existence and some things like email and IM have been immensely popular all Twitter did was say what if I have a short something to say and there you have it a radical change in the outcome of messaging
- The thing that is being changed is removed from obscurity - Kiva is a company that fits this perfectly, we all know that there are poor countries but what about the entreprenuers and small business people in those countries who are willing to build something for themselves and their families, through Kiva we can see them and we can loan them money at the click of a button and now 1000s of people are all of a sudden out of the shadows.
Now, given these rather tough metrics you've got to ask yourself, "what would it look like if the strategic and business planning and implementation world were changed?
- It would become exciting - as mentioned previously the general tendancy is to run for the hills when people start talking about strategy or business planning, this fear :) has got to stop
- Anyone could do it successfully - as we have also discussed in the past the academics and MBA's (some of my best friends are MBA's) have hijacked the whole process such that most people feel that it is too hard to successfully implement a strategy or business plan effectively, this too needs to change, it's important that success is 9.5 out of 10 not 3-4 out of10 or how can you build efficient economic engines
- People could share their plans and collaborate on them anywhere they were working - most people freely admit that strategy is created on a white board and typed into a pretty document, which goes immediately to dust collection duty on the nearest shelf never to be seen again, surely if we can share music, pictures, and our every movement we ought to be able to share a simple strategy or business plan?
So, it became our goal to change the "world" of strategy and business plan implementation, making it exciting because you could get started right away, with the expectations of a great reward upon completion, making it so everyone could do it via a simple process of defining goals, creating some actions and then following them through and finally making it easy to share what was going on with the process.
These are really simple things but in the end we hope that it is in fact the simplicity that will allow us to change the decades old ideas on strategy and business planning and how these things are implemented acrosss organizations.
Please join us as we shake things up!
Thanks,
Ed Loessi
