Unplan Your Business in Management Today

I've just written a column for Management Today's Expert section on 'unplanning your business' - introducing innovation into your business thinking.
You can read it HERE.

Getting students fired up about business

Robert-Jon Eckhardt (@Eckie) follows me on Twitter. He’s an industrial design student in the Netherlands and posted a video question to me about how business planning can be alienating and does not engage students interested in entrepreneurship. His video references a entrepreneurial website from his university that fails to engage interest. Here’s his question:

And here’s my response below:

Business success does not have to be about long term planning; it’s about making ideas happen. Yesterday a prospectus for a business school landed in my in-tray. It’s full of courses on business planning, strategic planning, management and leadership. But where’s the course on implementation? Isn’t getting your idea out there the important bit? However sexy your five year plan may look like, your business will succeed or fail out in the real world.

RETHINKING BUSINESS

So as I reach the end of SXSW 2010 what's my takeaways from five days?

#1 Staying Authentic: whatever technological developments, whatever trends, new platforms or tools come along, (of course) success is about keeping it real. I was reminded of this many times in the last few days, not least by @garyvee in his keynote/ Q&Afest.

#2 You Don't Have To Grow It Big: I've been evangelising this for a while, that you don't have to build a business big to be a success; you don't have to scale up your people or your reach the whole time, you can grow in other ways. So I loved @jasonfried's message from 'Rework' that instead of building it big, why not focus on building a business that is sustainable, profitable and comfortable. Yep yep.

#3 Reaching out to others: I put 'collaboration' as one of my themes for 2010 and a session here reminded me of the benefits of reaching out to the crowd. @jeffrey and @scottbelsky ran a session on crowdsourcing showing how businesses/ brands can tap into consumer insight and the intellectual capital of the crowd. We're used to outsourcing so much in business today, going out to the crowd is a great resource.

#4 Unplanning our businesses: Of course, my own theme for SXSW was 'Unplanning' your business but it was great to hear this from other speakers, not just @jasonfried but also @Ev who reminded us that 'whatever you assume when you start out (in business), you're wrong'. I'm not anti-planning, just evangelising that passion and vision are more powerful/valuable than a business plan (check out my Unplan blog).

#5 It's all about results: another drum I've been banging is that we need to rethink' work'; that 'work is a mindset, not a place you go'. So I loved the session on ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) led by @alevit that talked about the cultural change from workers being rewarded for 'just showing up' to instead getting rewarded for results. It creates some opportunities - and challenges - for freelancers and independent consultants to cease being paid by the day, but being paid by the outcome of what they do. That doesn't mean we need to get obsessed with data and analytics to look at ROI, but it's a much more realistic way of looking at productivity.

#6 Business doesn't have to be dull. These are tough times for business and we're having to work harder than ever. But as many speakers reminded us, we should not be total workaholics and we need to learn to 'switch off'. And from all the sessions, parties and connections SXSW reminds me that business can be fun. One SXSW moment sticks in my head; it was the evening I was lucky  (thanks for the invite @espreedevora )to be on Tony Hsieh's 'Delivering Happiness' bus, going around Austin - hip-hop playing, an on-board bar, a woman making balloons, and the senior management of Zappos and their friends having fun. No suits or traditional networking in sight.

#7 Rethink 'Business'. I think it's time we rethink what 'business' is. Someone - I think @jeffrey - said 'business is the mechanism for taking an idea from concept to delivery' and that's a good one. To some, SXSW interactive is about geeks, or technology, or creativity; to me - it's just about business. Not the business of Wall St, The City, your local Chamber Of Commerce or Business Link,not about suits, powerpoint presentations and business plans but THE BUSINESS OF YOU & ME. Doing it your way, your style and you don't need to give a damn about 'the rules' (whatever they are). I got a tweet today that my Unplan idea is 'dangerous rubbish' but I'm seeking to disrupt the assumptions of the status quo and show people you can be successful by doing it your own way. It's like what Tim Ferriss wrote to me in his book when I met him on a rooftop in Austin: 'here's to experimenting often and exploring the uncommon'.

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire Interview

Last night I was a guest on Sue Marchant’s show on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire talking about rethinking your approach to business and ‘Unplanning’. You can hear the interview again via the  BBC iPlayer HERE (link only works for 7 days). The interview starts at around 16:40 and lasts 10 minutes.

Unplan Your Business

In these turbulent economic times, the wise among us question every business certainty. Business-as-usual hasn’t served individuals, businesses or governments well. Traditional long-term strategy retains its place but, with web based tools revolutionising the speed at which we can launch and test ideas, I think the future requires we bust the myth that we can plan/guess the future and, that we need to UNPLAN OUR BUSINESSES instead. 

“How To Unplan Your Business” is my latest project; a collaboration with a friend and former colleague David Sloly.

In my research I have gathered various contributions from entrepreneurs and management thinkers including Tom Peters, Kevin Roberts (Worldwide CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi), Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos), David Hieatt (ex CEO Howies), Gary Vaynerchuk, Michael Schrage (prototyping guru) and Alan Webber (founding editor of Fast Company) - all of whom, for different reasons, support the idea.

WEB you can see these contributions at the Unplan blog here.

READ there’s a free ebook, that you can download here.

LIVE if you’re going to be at SXSW Interactive, join us at 5pm on Saturday March 13^th in Room E at the Hilton for a Big Conversation

VIDEO there’s a short video here

AUDIO and a short audio trailer here

Forget The Planning. Focus On Doing.

I’ve spent much of my career busting myths about the way things *should* be in life and business. In most organisations there’s a lot of effort devoted to the tradition of business planning. Five year plans, forecasts, projections. But now more than ever, I don’t see the point of long term planning. Sure, I understand the rationale: the importance of investor and shareholder accountability and of measuring performance. But it seems so academic in an ever changing world: better to be pragmatic and reactive in a world where things change in a flash.


It’s a subject that I hope to be talking about at SXSW 2010 with David Sloly – ‘How To Unplan Your Business’. I also talked to Gary Vaynerchuk about it on his recent trip to London (video here, go to 08:11):

"A 5 year plan is impossible in a world where what 5 years represents is so different than it used to”.

And then this week Stefan Stern in the FT talked about ‘The Death Of The Five Year Plan’:

“..markets are unpredictable. The economic outlook is uncertain. The world has changed. If old-style strategy formulation is not exactly dead, then it is hardly in the best of health”.

So I say forget long plans and just focus on DO-ING. Put the damn idea or start-up or new product into the market and test and tweak as you go. Forget projections about what it’s going to make in Year 2, who knows until you get started? Who knows how market forces will change, how technology will change the game?

Let’s remember how technology has changed business lifecycles. I can launch a web business in a couple of hours. I can shoot a video on my Flip and post it up straight away. Here’s another example of the game-change. On Monday evening the songwriter Dave Stewart said let’s write a song on Twitter. Followers had just five minutes to write the lyrics and 24 hours later, the results are up = a demo of the song ‘Love Tower’ (featuring my lyrics). And it’s good! Download it here.

So quit the big planning and the big plans and just GET DO-ING.