Quotes About Planning

How much time and energy should companies invest in infrastructure and planning early on in anticipation of success? Spend too much and you waste precious time that could have been spent learning. Spend too little and you may fail to take advantage of early success and cede market leadership to a fast follower.

in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness.

Although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.

Remember, planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operating history. And yet, do any of us feel that the world around us is getting more and more stable every day? Changing such a mind-set is hard but critical to startup success.

Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.

although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning

For startups, the role of strategy is to help figure out the right questions to ask.

Wealthfront

This is true startup productivity: systematically figuring out the right things to build.

As an engineer and later as a manager, I was accustomed to measuring progress by making sure our work proceeded according to plan, was high quality, and cost about what we had projected.

Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car.

focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work.

Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately.

your money. Don't expect your inspections to eliminate all future

To achieve typical longer-term financial goals, such as retiring, the money that you save and invest generally needs to grow at a rate much faster than the rate of inflation.

A design that doesn't take change into account risks major redesign in the future.

To solve the problems of today, we must focus on tomorrow.

What does lasting value mean in a society that is only interested in immediate results? How should we judge a community that simply takes short term projects in account and merely looks at a short-sighted horizon? In point of fact, a clear vision goes beyond a misty horizon. Through its mental dimension, the quality of vision stands out to the sheer physical, geographical or time-based horizon. ("Horizon and Vision" )

If Gray Wing thinks he's going to take us by surprise, then he can think again!

It is always goodWhen a man has two irons in the fire.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

She hoped the examination would not take too long because she had to take Patty to her art class, shop for tonight's dinner, and fix the hem of Patty's new dress for her sixth birthday party next week.

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.