Quotes About Planning

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.

In his daydreams he was busy planning how to ask Kate to marry him someday. He thought, as a fourth-generation undertaker, it might be proper to say simply, "Kate, how would you like to be buried in the Wright family plot beside me?

While the women talked, he did what he often did in the presence of people he didn't particularly like; he began planning Martha Q's funeral.

The issues that preoccupy bicycle advocates in the West—bike commuting as a planning priority and "lifestyle choice"—have little connection to the reality of the hundreds of millions for whom cycling is simply a necessity, the only viable and affordable means of travel.

We let our dreams take over. We stopped saying someday and started saying next year, next month, next week.

She's one of those people who live way too much in their heads and are too invested in their careful plans.

Sometimes the best plays are performed behind the scenes

or, at least, should have a rota

We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live.

It would, of course, have to look like an accident.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

Do you want to just let it all out, or are you thinking of what to do about it next?

You know that Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we'd be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

To make these unlesses most effective, we need to create strong precommitment contracts that set out how we're going to follow through on those kill criteria. Then, to make sure that we're picking the unlesses that are going to get us to the fastest answer about whether the thing we're doing is worth pursuing, we need to do the work of identifying monkeys and pedestals.

Unlesses can get us out from under the forces that will keep us playing in the short run, chasing a win, and align our behavior more closely with our long-term best interests.

For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is "Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls." Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.

When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things. For clients of mine who are institutional investors, I have suggested that type of strategy as a way to improve their sell-side decisions. Have the committee approving what to buy be different from the committee approving what and when to sell.

Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can't create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.

If our goal is to lose twenty pounds in six months, we can plan how to achieve that by imagining it's six months from now and we've lost the weight. What are the things we did to lose the weight? How did we avoid junk food? How did we increase the amount of exercise we were doing? How did we stick to the regimen?

I think that becoming a successful rock band is a little like becoming a professional athlete. Nobody plans on it.

When we go out to the university, the professors always say, 'Tell these students about your five-year plan and your 10-year plan,' and I say, 'Gee, we're lucky if we have a year plan.'

You will always need more capital than you think, because it will always take you longer to reach profitability than you can imagine.

Chasing profits and building a long-term profit model are two different things.