The plan-as-you-go business plan is better than the standard old-fashioned formal business plan for several good reasons.
- Everybody in business deserves business planning to help her manage. That doesn’t mean, however, that everybody ought to have a formal plan document written out.
- Things change fast. Planning needs to be quick and flexible and sensitive to changing assumptions. It’s like steering, or navigation: eyes up on the horizon, looking at long-term directions, while also managing concrete specifics.
- The plan is useless, but planning is essential. As I wrote this we’re eight years into the 21st century now, four years into Web 2.0 and social media, 30 years into personal computing; it was time to change our views on business planning.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
