Picking up on Chet’s call in his latest blog to ACT, I’d like to recommend an action that all of us who lead anybody or anything need to do right now:
Scrap you current plan for 2009 and start over.
If your fiscal year is this calendar year, you started thinking about this year last summer. How long ago does that seem now?
That was the “Roaring 20’s” and we’re now in “The New Deal.”
So, here’s the deal: Erase the white board and rethink everything. If the assumptions you are making now are based, even a little bit, on the assumptions you made right after your vacation on the beach last August, they’re wrong. Dead wrong.
Even though Chet would like it to be otherwise, “we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.” We’re on the other side of the rainbow and it’s time to take stock of the situation on the ground here in MunchkinLand.
If my recommendation seems too disruptive, too drastic, too depressing to act on, rethink that assumption, too. If you think you’ve got a “solid” plan, and are waiting for something magical from the Wizard to happen this summer to re-prime the pump of demand, well…could be. Who knows? Umm, maybe. I could be wrong. It’s happened before.
After all, he is “the great and powerful Oz” according to his PR agency.
If, on the other hand, this “downturn” might last awhile beyond the summer of 2009, your assumption that all will be well by June, or September, could be fatal.
And if you wait, and “get back to business” now, you will create a vacuum of what we used to call “strategic thinking.”
Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will fill it. Someone will fill it.
Will it be you?
Here’s a question: What if you had to survive for another five years beyond this summer at this level of demand?
Could you?
How?
Would it be fat, muscle, bones, or brains that you’d cut first? How could you tell?
“Vision” is up to the one in charge. Do your people trust your vision? Do your customers? Are they aligned with it? Engaged, and bought it to it? How do you know?
Dwight Eisenhower, who knew a thing or two about plans, once said this: “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential.”
I like Ike.
What do you think?
BUILT TO LEAD 