Unplan Your Business in Management Today

I've just written a column for Management Today's Expert section on 'unplanning your business' - introducing innovation into your business thinking.

You can read it HERE.

Business Planning Vs. Business Doing

Here's a post I've just done for Virgin Media Pioneers. What's your focus this week: business planning or business doing?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Follow Your Instinct

I recently had a conversation on email with REWORK co-author and 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson. That will be the subject of one of my columns for BNET.com later this month, but in the meantime here's an extra in the shape of a question I asked David about planning:


Ian: "I know you guys don’t like long-term plans. But you’ve decided to design your business in a certain way. What guided that process – just raw instinct or something more strategic?"


David: "We rely heavily on instinct. An instinct that has been developed and formed from a decade in business. Some times careful analysis is helpful, but often times you're just trying to justify what your instinct is already telling you. Why not follow that straight from the get go."

"When There's No Plan A"

I've been talking to Jonathan Moules, Enterprise Editor at The Financial Times for a while about #Unplan, putting him in touch with entrepreneurs I know who embrace the 'unplan your business' philosophy. So I'm delighted to see the results of that in an article in today's FT "When There's No Plan A" featuring my #unplan buddies Gary Vaynerchuk, David Hieatt and Raj Dey. You can read the article online at FT.com here (registration applies). You can also click to view a scan of the article below (this content is copyright The Financial Times). Finally, a big shout out to my #Unplan collaborator David Sloly who was not mentioned in the article; I'd like to point out that 'Unplan Your Business' is a collaborative project with David and that he is the co-author of our free guide, that you can grab here.

Peter Bregman On Unplanning

I just discovered a couple of posts from Peter Bregman. Peter is  CEO of Bregman Partners  and writes a weekly column, How We Work, for HarvardBusiness.org.

It's worth checking out his column “Don’t Get Distracted By your Plan” where he talks about his business journey:

“I started my company over 12 years ago with a 50-page business plan. It was a very useful tool — it kept me focused, helped me avoid mistakes, enabled me to settle on a growth strategy. But if you look at my company today, it looks nothing like that plan. Because the economy changed, I changed, my clients changed, and the opportunities changed. If I had stuck to my plan, I would have failed. It was by keeping my eye on the changing environment, and being willing to toss the plan and create a new one in sync with new realities that enabled me to grow my business”

There’s a follow up column “Why Not Having A Plan Can Be The Best Plan Of All” where Peter advocates the need to stay flexible in career development and the qualities entrepreneurs need to experiment in business:

“The entire path need not be clear. Most successful people and businesses have meandered their way to success by being willing to exercise their talents in ways they never would have imagined at the onset.”

David Heinemeier Hansson: Planning Can Be Harmful

David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner at Chicago software house 37signals. He’s the co-author of a great book ‘Rework’ which I have mentioned before on this blog because it really resonates with the whole Unplan ethos.

Here’s a great little video (2 mins) called ‘Planning Is Guessing’ taken from David’s presentation at Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture Series in January this year. David's take on business planning is that a start-up doesn't even know if it will be doing business in five years, let alone five months. A new business in a new industry has no clue what it will need long-term. In fact, he adds, most decisions for a start-up are incredibly temporary. His own experience at 37signals is that although they’ve been around for ten years, they only worry about ‘the next two weeks’ or if things are really crazy ‘two months’. They don’t worry about what next year might look like as it has very little impact on what it will actually look like.

Boost your business by Pivoting

As the Ash Cloud over Europe causes chaos forcing us to change our plans, it’s a reminder that we’re not in control of our businesses, and flexibility and adaptability are key to survival. A key tenet of #unplanyourbusiness is the ability to adapt our business idea on the fly, changing our model to meet demand or reflect user feedback.

Jonathan Moules wrote an article ‘A pivotal moment in the life of a start-up’ in the Weekend FT. ‘Pivoting’ is a term derived from basketball, where players move around the court. Moules quotes Mark Suster, partner at LA venture capital firm GRP Partners that the ability to pivot is one of the key characteristics of a successful entrepreneur: 

“Every entrepreneur starts with an idea that they believe makes sense. But then your customers start using your products, your competitors come out with new offerings and your partners decide to launch a similar product rather than working with you. You’re forced to pivot on a regular basis”.*

 There are some great examples of pivoting in the article including Moo.com, Facebook and Twitter.

*Copyright Financial Times 2010