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"intelligent" Strategic Flexibility" “Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly”. That quote from Thomas Bacon was uttered back around the year 1600, but it is as good advice today as it was back then. In fact, given the rate of change today, I would argue that it is even more relevant! You know that things will change. You know your market will always be in flux, with new companies entering it, new products and services appearing, new customers, new regulations, new technology, companies going out of business, and on, and on, and on. Change will happen. So, it begs the question – why plan if there is going to be so much change? Indeed, in his book The Strategy Paradox, Michael Raynor notes that managers must make choices with far-reaching consequences today, but must base those choices on assumptions about a future they cannot predict. If the future does not turn out as expected, these strategies can fail horribly. It is quite difficult to accurately predict what the future will hold, and the further out you try to predict, the less accurate you will be. Think about the weather forecast. How often have you relied on the local weather forecast to plan some important activity, and then gotten rained out. Strategic Planning is, no matter how you “dress it up”, a guessing game. By being very rigorous in your planning, you can stack the odds that your guesses will be right, or at least right enough. And, even more critically, the process that you go through to create your plans will yield tremendous information and insights into your markets, your competitors, and your own company. These insights are perhaps the best reason that going through the process of creating a strategic plan is well worth the effort. As an example, suppose you were going to get in a road race with your neighbor. The race was going to take you from San Diego, California to San Francisco, California, a distance of about 500 miles. Suppose further that there is a $1,000,000.00 prize for the one who gets there first. Race day arrives and your neighbor is off and running. He is gone out of site before you have gone a mile. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that he is driving a Porsche, and you are driving a minivan. Things don't look too good eh? Well, 500 miles later, you are sitting there, having dinner at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco when he comes flying down the road, just getting into town. It would probably be nice if you bought him a nice glass of wine with your million dollar prize. How in the world, you are saying, did I beat the Porsche? The answer is really quite simple, you planned your trip. You took the time to go to AAA or Google Driving Directions to map out your route. You found out in advance where the detours where, and where traffic was likely to be backed up (if you have driven anywhere in California, there are plenty of those spots!). You know what else you did, you had one of those fancy new Global Positioning Satellite devices in your car so that it was near impossible to get lost. Oh, by the way, your GPS was the really neat kind that gave you real-time updates on traffic conditions and construction delays – in other words, you had a great strategy and intelligent flexibility. As I mentioned earlier, one of the greatest benefits of doing strategic planning is the incredible amount of information you gather in the process. That information will allow you to be very sensitive to changes in your market, and to react to them in a way that ensures your continued profitability. That information will enable you to cope with the fickle demands of customers and the free-ranging attacks of the competition. Prepare to take advantage of a world interconnected in ways not yet understood; of huge quantities of money searching for profitable ideas; of a world where people are increasingly ready to pay to save time, and a world where change occurs with marvelous regularity. Prepare with great plans, and greater knowledge.
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