Quotes About Planning

As my friend and coach, Nelson Searcy, says, "Hope is not a church strategy.

day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became

To manage product development effectively, we must recognize that valuable new information is constantly arriving throughout the development cycle. Rather than remaining frozen in time, locked to our original plan, we must learn to make good economic choices using this emerging information.

if we incentivize conformance, people will insert contingency reserves to prevent their tasks from missing the schedule. The more granular the schedule, the larger the schedule reserves. And these reserves aggregate into even longer timelines. The more we increase planning detail and the harder we try to incentivize performance, the worse our problem becomes.

We live in an uncertain world. We must recognize that our original plan was based on noisy data, viewed from a long time-horizon.

Product development produces the recipes for products, not the products themselves.

I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.

That's a good thing to keep in mind—use your mind to visualize how things might be, as you go along. That can make the plethora of details and setbacks just a part of the plan.

I wonder if what might help couples build great families is to pick a place for their family to go and then hit the gas, to work toward their vision and build it out.

What do you want your marriage to look like?" he repeated. I'd never thought about it. I'd spent countless

Good stories don't happen by accident, I learned. They are planned.

Financial Advisor: "A Plan for Your Retirement" College Alumni Association: "Leave a Meaningful Legacy" Fine-Dining Restaurant: "A Meal Everybody Will Remember" Real Estate Agent: "The Home You've Dreamed About" Bookstore: "A Story to Get Lost In" Breakfast Bars: "A Healthy Start to Your Day

Section 5: The Plan

Keep the Plan Visually Simple

For instance, if step one in the plan is to "set up a call," what benefits will they receive from that call? Will it save them time, will they find out if they're a good fit, will they get information they currently don't have?

Dollars"— A downloadable PDF guide offered by a financial advisor who wanted to find young, newly wealthy clients to help them with their financial planning.

ROADMAP TASK THREE: CREATE AN AUTOMATED E-MAIL DRIP CAMPAIGN

Do not spend too much time planning or trying to anticipate and solve problems before they happen. That is just another kind of excuse for procrastination. Until you start, you won't know where the problems will occur. You won't have the experience to solve them. Instead, get into action, and solve the problems as they arise.

If you plan for the worst—if you can live with the worst—the good will always take care of itself.

Well if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner. "Aspargus is in season," said Francis helpfully.

he said well if you can't plan it out ahead of time, you'll just have to work it out as you go along

George would come in and say, 'Hey, we're going to have this giant snow battle, start doing some storyboards,' Ã¢â'¬Â says Johnston. "But there was no script! But George would say, 'Don't worry about that, just do the storyboards.' The process then was to lay out random shots and pick out some that would conceivably work. George would work on the script at home while I would be working on the boards.