Michael Schrage: Entrepreneurs Need Traditional Business Planning As Much As Fish Need Bicycles

I must confess I wasn’t familiar with Michael Schrage until Tom Peters told me about him. So I looked him up. A co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative, Michael Schrage writes, consults and collaborates in the design and development of digital innovation. He’s a research fellow with the Sloan School of Management's Center for Digital Business and a visiting fellow at Imperial College's 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship' programme. He's done consulting and advisory work for Microsoft, Procter&Gamble, British Telecom, BP, Siemens, Embraer, Google, iRise, Mars, the Office of Net Assessment and other organizations. Editorially, Schrage has been a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Wired, Red Herring, Forbes, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

When Tom Peters called Michael the ‘guru’ of prototyping, it was clear I needed to track him down. And this is what he has to contribute to the #Unplan debate:

“ To repurpose a ‘60s cliché, entrepreneurs need traditional business planning as much as fish need bicycles.... Even with generously flexible definitions of 'traditional,' I’d argue that investments in 'planning' are less valuable and/or useful and/or useable than investments in adaptiveness, responsiveness and agility....

When entrepreneurs come to me for 'free' advice, I generally ask them to discuss with me their three or five most cherished, most important and most essential 'assumptions' they have around their proposed business - this makes clear to me what level of rigor and comprehensiveness they've brought to their thinking. Then I ask them what prototypes, models and experiments they've explored to test and challenge those assumptions...because actions always speak louder than words...deeds are always more persuasive than thoughts.

To me, 'planning' is not about how we project into the future, it's how we stress test and retest the assumptions we build upon to innovate and advance”.

picture credit: HSM Global

Tom Peters: He Who Tries The Most Stuff The Fastest Wins

Tom Peters has been a great inspiration to me throughout my career. I asked Tom for his take on ‘unplanning’ and was told to expect a response in March on his return from New Zealand. But in typical Tom style, I actually got a response 48 hours later. I was going to edit his email but decided it more apt to post it here in its entirety:


“MIT's Michael Schrage is the ‘guru’ and my guru on the topic of prototyping, about which he's written a ton. To begin with he labels it the #1 core competence of an innovative organization. But the even more profound point he makes is that innovation is per se the reaction to a prototype. That is, first and foremost, you've gotta have something/s of substance to shoot at if you want to move forward. Which brings me to my other guru on this topic, Texan and EDS founder Ross Perot. His motto: ‘Ready. Fire. Aim.’ Some time after Ross sold EDS to GM, he contrasted the two firms. He said that the EDS ‘strategy’ was ‘Ready. Fire. Aim.’ By contrast, GM's way was ‘Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim. ...’ Well, we all know the rest of the (sad) story.


In 1982, Bob Waterman and I wrote a book called In Search of Excellence, which was organized around the ‘Eight Basics’ of ‘Excellent companies.’ Something had to be first! And it was, we said, ‘A Bias for Action.’ In 2010 in my speeches I claim (and mean it) that I've ‘only learned one thing in 40 years’ of business: ‘He who tries the most stuff the fastest wins.’


I started to add here, ‘While I'm no enemy of planning ...’ But I am an enemy of overly elaborate planning processes. I am a firm (almost ‘religious’) believer in the power of ‘gettin' goin'.’ I'll leave the last few words to my late father, Frank Peters: ‘Don't just stand there, do something’ "

photo credit: Allison Shirreffs