Good Bye Strategic Planning!

We have to kiss the usual strategic plans goodbye. Even with continuous planning and scenario planning, it takes too long to make the plan and it's obsolete before you print it for the workers. What needs to replace it? How will we know what to DO?

This is the era of tribes and initiation and experimentation and doing. If you can instant message or text message instead of emailing you know what I mean. If you know how instant parties are generated through Twitter, you know what I mean. Yesterdays fast is tomorrow’s slow. 

Now what? It’s time to build a different kind of mouse trap. Here is what I can say today, the day I am writing this, which is by now ancient history. Have ideas. Talk about them to people you know, people in your business, people who are your friends, talk about them with your kids, your spouse, and most importantly, with your new Social Network, LinkedIn, Facebook, , sta.rtup.biz,  Women with Moxie, or YesMan, or the one your group just invented on a NING site last night. See who salutes your flag, and gather them to your tee-pee. You are starting a new “tribe”.
 
To be the Chief has to be put second to empowering your group to each be leaders, to fully participate, to be heretics and challenge that the way to do things best is the way they were done yesterday. By facilitating and sticking to it you’ll be the new kind of leader, emerging or maybe not! It’s not going to last very long. Look at the record industry. Who knows next how tunes will enter you? It’s like surfing. Make the best of the wave you are on, then get off and find another better one.

Is this not helter-skelter? Can we humans stand this level of change? How are we going to do business without a plan?

Plans are dreams. We used to say it the other way around. Dreams guide us until the next dream. So if you have a business idea, you might as well tell somebody. It might be the one out of a hundred that makes a big splash for you, or for your company, or for a whole industry. Welcome to the world of the possible. Maybe the tribe in your tee-pee can create a new kind of rug. Ride that idea and spread the news. If your rug plays Mozart, it will probably have a market, and if it only plays Mozart when you think Mozart, that’s even better! If somebody will buy it, somebody else will invest in it, and for a while you’ll think you have finally made it.
 
Don’t rest too long. If you think you deserve a cruise, make it short. When you get back, come and see me and I’ll help you through the transition to your next dream.