Speed of business today has become the speed of thought

Planes, trains and automobiles all have gotten faster as the years go by. The Chinese CRH380A is the world's fastest train with a top speed of 302 mph. In the air it's the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird that holds the record for a manned aircraft at just a shade over 2,193 mph. A little closer to our industry is the world's fastest passenger car – the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport has been officially clocked at a brisk 267.857 mph.

Human beings control all these conveyances. Think about the decision-making process of a person travelling through the air at more than 1/2 mile per second. There's no room for indecisiveness on the part of anyone operating any of these vehicles.

My point? The speed of business today has become the speed of thought. Everything in our business environment is moving faster. Certainly a key attribute, maybe the most important one, for today's managers and management teams is decisiveness.

Most of us remember a time when a company wasn't worth its salt unless it had a five-year strategic plan on the shelf.

More recently, the speed of doing business augmented by the imposition of technology and its immediacy has pushed strategic planning to the back burner. These days the ability to react quickly has seemingly become more important now than copious analysis and long-range planning skills.

I’m not convinced that is a completely good thing.

Pragmatically, with everything moving faster and faster, your planning cycle has to change as well. This reality was the impetus for the creation of something called “drive-thru planning.”

Drive-thru planning is the express lane of strategic planning. It operates under the presumption that most aftermarket companies do not desire to tie up their key executives for longer than a day. Still, they appreciate the need to collectively contemplate the company’s future and to prognosticate about outcomes.   

Drive-thru planning features all the elements of more traditional strategic planning; it is the process that is “stripped down.” It starts with creating the primary goal of the business. A goal is that bright spot on the horizon that everyone on the team is aiming for.

The goal is the loftiest aspiration of a company and the driver of its plans. Goals are generally long-term commitments, often expressed indefinitely or in superlative terms. A goal sometimes goes by other names such as the vision or the mission. By definition there can be only one primary goal and its singular purpose must be clear: the unification and concentration of a business’s energy and activities on a common heading.

Years ago, someone defined a goal to me as “a journey, not a destination.” I think that is an apt definition. Goals do not have to be measurable, that is the provenance of objectives. The language of goals should be to “maximize” or to be “revered” or to be “perceived as the leader.”  Words like maximize or revered are not at all measurable, but they are all valid language for a goal.

 Objectives follow closely behind the goal and bring direction to it. If a goal is a “journey,” then objectives are mile markers on the trip. Objectives are interim targets that must be measurable in time or occurrences or both. If a goal is to be the dominant brand, an objective might be to achieve a 60 percent market share by the end of the fiscal year.

Goals and objectives go hand in hand and are the starting point for drive-thru planning. Defining a goal for the business and each department’s objectives to support the goal is the result for a good initial drive-thru planning meeting. Typically, in a well-moderated session top managers can navigate those tasks in less than a half-day.

Next month we will talk about how strategies and tactics are put in place to support a primary goal and appropriate objectives in the drive-thru planning methodology.

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