Quotes About Planning

The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home.

Provide opportunities for others to step back and take stock, both organizationally and individually: schedule offsites, process reviews, surveys, and open conversations; offer people the chance to review their careers and refocus their efforts in areas of growing interest to them.

You also need to give people a role in dealing effectively with the transition process itself. The easiest way to do this is to be sure that everyone has some role on one of the planning task forces, climate survey groups, problem-solving circles, or transition monitoring teams.

Some people are making such thorough plans for rainy days that they aren't enjoying today's sunshine.

Men of routine or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare. They are paid in proportion to the supply and demand of them.

They sought to answer such questions as What is the intended destination for this business in ten or twenty years? What must management be doing today to raise the probability of arriving at that destination? And what could prevent this company from reaching such a favorable destination?

Fifth, in a world that's increasingly geared toward short-termism and instant gratification, a tremendous advantage can be gained by those who move consistently in the opposite direction

Many companies enter businesses planning to capture only a small percentage of the market. Such plans are not conservative; they are extremely dangerous. They are strategies for failure. The only good plans and the only good marketing programs are those aimed at dominance, backed by sufficient resources to achieve it, and executed with precision.

Because we cannot predict the future, we diversify. —Paul Samuelson

If you decide to buy bonds or a bond fund, make sure the average maturity is less than the time horizon of the savings.

When, and only when, you've gotten rid of all your debt are you truly saving for retirement.

Competencies, when measurable through behaviors or work outputs, become a foundation for planning for talent, building talent, and acquiring talent. Although

What are your goals for the call?" "If things go right, what are some stretch goals?" "What is the worst thing that might happen in the call, and what are ways to avoid it?" "What value will the customer will get from this call?" 

Architecture theory is very interesting.

designate two or three days each month as "X" days, during which they wouldn't schedule any meetings. I'd spend some of those days alone thinking about our businesses.

We had to scrub our books and practices so that they reflected the reality of our underlying businesses. We also had to shake our executives out of their blinding fixation on quarterly results. Only then could we make planning decisions that supported long-term growth.

One of my top priorities as CEO was to eradicate the BS and reinvent planning. Every year, starting in 2003, I required teams presenting to me to write a three-to-four-page executive summary that highlighted the basic plan. That document would allow us to cut through the pages of obfuscating charts and bullet points.

We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future.

The first key idea is that when you have a challenge for which measuring progress is hard, the ability to adapt is just as important as the ability to plan.

Dan asks the class whether any of them has ever checked the weather on their phone to see if it's likely to rain while they're outside. Everyone has. "What do you do if you see there's a 30% chance of rain?" "Take an umbrella", several students all say at once.

Pone merum et talos pereat qui crastina curat.

Send meeting materials in advance

Reconfirm scheduled events before they happen. Announce changes to scheduled or committed dates as soon as they change. Intimacy

Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.