Planning for ’03

What has happened (and still happens) is that the decisions that we have made (and still make) about immediate business acceleration will come back to bite us in the long term. … So at the start of a brand-new year, you might want to look at where your past decision making might catch up with you, and revisit what you think is tactical and what you think is strategic.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to be thinking about our plans. We need to look at our strategies and our tactics, figure out how we got to where we are and figure out where we are going.

Traditionally we thought of strategic planning as a window of three to five years and the tactical window as one to three years. But the PC revolution and then the Internet revolution made those time frames look like geological epochs.

Now the strategic window is seen as one to two years (although arguably sometimes it’s not seen at all), while the tactical window is so short that for some of us what we’re going to have for lunch is part of our considerations. (“Let’s see, it is now 1:30 – I’ll just have a Coke ’cause I’ve got to get that enterprise CRM system installed and running by 2 p.m.”)

It would be a joke if it wasn’t so dang serious. And now that we’re post-iBubble, many of us have tried to take our foot off the gas, at least a little bit, and go back to a less frenetic pace of life – albeit one that is faster than pre-iBubble and much, much faster than pre-PC.

The problem with slowing down is that we don’t feel that we can. This is because one of the most interesting aspects of “Internet time” – the compulsion to grab onto technologies and products that gave companies, at least in theory, opportunity advantage.

Typically these were technologies and products that were supposed to enable us to do things faster. So, we used them and gained (we thought) a competitive advantage.

Then what happened? Our competition adopted the same technologies and products and soon there was no advantage – the playing field was leveled. But in the process we all pushed a little harder on the gas pedal.

We’d been heading down the road at 50 mph, and each month we’d gone a little faster. Suddenly we were all doing 100 mph!

The trouble is that the business freeway is so crowded that common wisdom says if you take your foot off the gas even a little, the guy behind you will run over you and laugh as he does so!

At least, that’s what common wisdom says will happen.

The question we should all ask ourselves is whether this headlong rush is a real necessity or something we’ve convinced ourselves is the way business must be run.

I contend that the manic drive to keep up with the traffic has led us to become sloppy and build business vehicles that cost us as much as we profit from them.

What has happened (and still happens) is that the decisions that we have made (and still make) about immediate business acceleration will come back to bite us in the long term.

Look at all the Web sites and online customer service operations that are pathetic in terms of delivering any kind of value to their intended audience. The owners of the businesses behind these ventures rushed online because everyone else was doing so – they thought they were keeping up with the traffic. Then in the ongoing pressure of business they lost sight of, well, their sites.

Now these companies have created a real problem for themselves – do they make their online activities actually work, or do they abandon them? What about the investment and brand issues that are involved with either decision? They are going to have to deal with the fact that they never considered the strategic consequences or their tactical decisions.

So at the start of a brand-new year, you might want to look at where your past decision making might catch up with you, and revisit what you think is tactical and what you think is strategic.

Share your plans with backspin@gibbs.com.