Quotes About Planning

Effective executives know where their time goes.

Note that the question is not "What do I want to do?" Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.

Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events.

The worst kind of replacement planning is the search for a "crown prince." A crown prince either has a legal right to succeed; or else nomination is likely to destroy him. No matter how carefully concealed, picking a crown prince is an overt act which the whole organization very rapidly perceives. And then all the other possible contenders unite against the crown prince and work to bring him down—and they usually succeed.

Make meetings productive

But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today—and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow—they are dreams, if not pretexts for nonthinking, nonplanning, nondoing. The

The aim of strategic planning is action now.

The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

Shefrin and Statman hypothesize the existence of a split in the human psyche. One side of our personality is an internal planner with a long-term perspective, an authority who insists on decisions that weight the future more heavily than the present. The other side seeks immediate gratification. These two sides are in constant conflict.

The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.

You have to keep your priorities straight, if you plan to do well in stocks.

By putting your stocks into categories you'll have a better idea of what to expect from them.

Only invest what you could afford to lose without that loss having any effect on your daily life in forseable future.

When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not.

One key reason for this is that the top-down, procedural planning approach is highly dependent on making predictions about the future based on past experience.

I had always insisted on structured practices with a clear agenda that the players would receive ahead of time.

eighteenth century. It had never been planned; it had grown piecemeal, with past and present overlapping at every spot, and the final effect was one of jumbled and squalid grandeur.

Relying on luck, however, does not constitute a policy.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly.

What is a city? What should it be? Why do we live in groups? What do we want from cities? And who decides?

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but

When we agree to meet with friends, have drinks, dinner, and watch a movie on a Friday evening, we incur coordination costs. All the emails, text messages, and phone calls that are required to arrange a social evening are the coordination costs. So

Our conduct today is affected by what we know of tomorrow.

As much as you obsess about all the things that can go wrong, it is inevitably something you can't imagine that ends up going wrong. Which justifies worrying about everything just to make sure it's all covered.