162 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
Beware of planning madness
Planning is hugely important. You must plan but if you actually want to get
anything vaguely constructive done, you must observe these rules when it
comes to planning.
Keep the plan simple and short
I have already mentioned the need to avoid the over-complicated plan
that sounds and looks great but that nobody can understand. Don’t judge
a plan by how thick it looks or how many pages it has. A 400-page docu-
ment is almost certainly less effective than a 10-page summary, which sets
out precisely what should be done, how, by whom, at what cost and with
sensible and realistic targets.
Don’t build your actions around planning meetings
Here is a hard and sad fact of corporate business life. The more planning
meetings you have to have and the more people you involve in the process,
the less you will get done. It is not smart to call a meeting to decide to do
something that is obvious.
For example, I worked with an organisation which was losing large sums of
money each month. I showed it why and it totally agreed and accepted the
cause of the problem. The organisation, however, could not x it straight
away because its next scheduled business development planning meeting
was not for another two months . . . Sigh.
Know what to do rst
One of the main causes of ‘activity inertia’ is businesses simply not
knowing what to do rst. If you have already read the rest of this book
then this should not be a major problem for you. Your focus should be on
‘Priority 1’ . . . converting your enquiries to protable business. You should
limit your investment of time and money on other activities until you have
truly mastered this issue and plugged any leaks in your ‘enquiries bucket’.
(See Chapter 5.)
Create some ‘have to’ targets
Let me explain what I mean. Think of a time when you have been under
pressure to get something done or achieve a particular outcome. Maybe
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