What’s Luck Got To Do With It?

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
How much depends on the yearly business plan? For many, it triggers budgets, funding, capital approvals, sanctioned projects, operating targets, salaries, product launches, support activities, hiring, office renovations, perks, …, lots of movement and a myriad of decisions, hopes, dreams, and nightmares. It is often the summary of what we expect, maybe wish or hope, to happen, commit to do, and the outcomes that the world of business should see, translated into the language of finance. How we get to a business plan is often very complex and incorporates science, judgments, guessing, posturing, analysis, modeling, gaming, negotiating, positioning, negotiating, horse trading, quid pro quos, and most importantly, the uneasiness of uncertainty. For some, it starts with a number that becomes the hard operational constraint, or a number that becomes the aspiration goals, or a combination or permutation of both. After years of roles building, executing, and navigating through business plans, many of us have concluded that they are often great for initial direction and alignment, but getting much more challenging for decision making as the fiscal year ensues. Reality looks more like Von Clausewitz’s “fog of war” than the futures we describe in our plan.
One aspect of business planning that continues to surface is the frosting of optimism that flavors them. After all, the business plan underpins our budget request, and we have a lot of interest in its approval. Nobody would ever accuse a turkey of voting for Thanksgiving. Recently we’ve witnessed the BP catastrophic events in the Gulf of Mexico, Apple’s embarrassing iphone reception flaws, and other unanticipated and unplanned failures, perhaps first hand. How outside of the known laws of physics or economics were they? What could we have considered to make a better choice? Would we change our decision with the benefit of retrospect?
As we begin to refine and polish our business plans for the fall submittals, are we confident, hopeful, or fearful? Did we subject our thinking to a skeptic’s review? Do our tools for evaluation ask the right questions? Do our planning, review, and approval process incorporate more science or art? How much is sales and how much is substance in the presentation?
What’s luck got to do with it?