Tom Fishburne: Waterfall Planning

Tom Fishburne learned how to draw cartoons at Harvard Business School by doodling on the backs of business cases and publishing in the school paper. Tom lives and draws near San Francisco and now speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences on marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas.

Tom’s just written a great post on unplanning. You can read the post in full on his site here; meantime here’s an excerpt:

“We need to accept that there will be risk and uncertainty in any worthwhile plan. We don't make that risk go away by crunching the spreadsheet yet another time. Instead, once we plan what we know, we should set the plan aside. Apply that time, energy, and focus on coming up with bigger ideas and making things happen. Place a few audacious unpredictable bets. Minimize the risk by maximizing the upside”.

Tom illustrated the post with a great cartoon which I have reposted with his permission above.

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.”