Flexible Business Design

Alastair Dryburgh wrote a price in last month's Management Today, 'Eight ways to design a better start-up’. The notion of business design (i.e. how you shape your venture) is an overlooked consideration for start-ups and he makes some good points about planning:

 

“Be wary of planning. This may sound heretical, but don't have a detailed business plan. Plans are dangerous because you can become wedded to them, even if it is soon clear they won't work.”

Alistair’s principles can be useful but effective design is less about fixed blueprints and more about creating the right attitude as the foundation for business success. Design the shape and culture of your business, yes; but don’t spend too much time creating a beautiful theoretical model that will never work in the real world. Being liberated from a plan means you have the flexibility to prototype your ideas in the market and then reinvent your offering accordingly. For me, business design is not about getting your model right first and sticking to it. It’s about getting your mindset right but staying agile and flexible to adapt as you go.

And the October issue of Management Today just published a letter from me saying just that (click on the above image to view).

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?

Why NOT having an MBA is an advantage for starting your first business

Yesterday I met Marianne Cantwell of FreeRangeHumans who did a video interview with me on #Unplanning. You can check out her blog post here and watch the video below:

Rajeeb Dey: Learn By Doing

Rajeeb Dey is passionate about start-ups and taking new ideas to market. He launched his first business when he was just 17 and although he only graduated from Oxford University in 2008 he’s already carved out an impressive portfolio of business interests. He’s Founder and CEO of Enternships -a service connecting talented students and graduates to start-ups/SMEs, and now lectures students on enterprise and business. He advocates that if people want to launch a business – especially if it is web based where the barriers to entry are so low – that they should just do it. “Learn by doing, iterate and get feedback from the market, learn as you go along” is his advice.


Here’s his take on planning and his story of how he launched Enternships

If the video above does not display properly, watch it on YouTube here.

Guest Post On The Cube

I've just written a guest post for Red Cube Marketing's blog 'The Cube' aimed at small businesses operating in the digital space; about the need to have a fresh approach to planning to reflect the increasing need to be agile. Read it here.

Why It's Time To Rip Up Your Five Year Plan

I've just written a post for the BNET website 'Rip Up Your Five Year Plan', check it out here.

How To Unplan Your Business: Video Trailer

What A Business School Thinks Of #Unplan

Kudos to the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. They’ve just included ‘How To Unplan Your Business’ in their '33 Promising SXSW Interactive Panels for Business' post. They said this about our idea:


“Ian Sanders and David Sloly have each seen their careers change course many times, and they argue that the right attitude is more important than a plan. They also say ‘business school training is a load of baloney’. While we here at the McCombs School of Business respectfully disagree, sometimes a little unconventional thinking might be just the trick to reinvigorate your business”.

SXSW session/ Hear the preview podcast

Our session ‘How To Unplan Your Business’ is now confirmed on the South By South West Interactive schedule for 5pm on Saturday March 13 at the Austin Convention Center. You can hear - and download - a podcast of David and I talking about the session at the SXSW website here. *

*this link doesn't seem to work in IE, but does with Firefox, Safari etc

Joe Oliver: Living The Unplanned Life

“I've run my business for over three years now and have lived exactly what you’re describing. Having never wrote a business plan I have been lambasted for my lack of 'planning'. However life is about surfing the good and bad waves that happen and as such my inertia of planning has allowed the business to be flexible enough to weather every kind of storm, whilst also allowing me to make split second decisions about holidays and new markets. Viva un-planning!”

Joe Oliver, Founder of Bash Creations, an eco-entertainment consultancy in London

Martijn Sjoorda: Don't Become Institutionalised

Martijn Sjoorda is Partner in Fresh Orange and Dialogic Leadership in the Netherlands, where he helps organisations become more effective, managing change be developing people. His take on business planning is that it should never be a procedure; his experience is that once it becomes institutionalised, it doesn’t get results. Instead Martijn advocates you should have a dot on the horizon that you are passionate about and focused on, but should constantly revisit how you get there. 

His other advice is: “don’t believe the bullshit in the spreadsheets”

Gary Vaynerchuk: The Reactionary Businessman

When he was in London last year I spent some time in the back of a car with Gary Vaynerchuk. Here’s our conversation about Gary’s attitude to planning: “A five year plan is impossible in a world where what five year represents is so different than it used to be”. Gary’s answer is to be open to opportunities and be a reactionary businessman.

Preethi Nair: Taking One Step Towards The Dream

Preethi Nair runs a business called Kiss The Frog that uses the principles of storytelling to inspire, enable and communicate change in business. Her clients include MTV, Lego and Deutsche Bank. She’s also a successful novelist. Preethi explains that rather than having a structured business plan she has a vision of what she wants to achieve and takes steps towards that dream taking into account factors like serendipity and coincidence.