December is a natural time to reflect upon the accomplishments of the past 12 months, and to set goals and objectives for the New Year.
In doing so however, most of us think too much about next year, and too little about our longer term and multi-year business horizons.
There are some benefits to this, I mean who can really forecast market and competitive conditions and customer wants and needs beyond just a few months these days?
And, given high rates of personnel turnover endemic to our ever-increasing “low switching cost” workplace, it can feel even more difficult to do so from a “bottoms-up” resource and organizational chart basis.
But forecast we must.
Because it is only through thinking and planning long-term that we access the reflective cores of our minds and spirits to “come up with” breakthrough business ideas simply inaccessible from the “reactive” present.
Ideas like:
• How to better leverage our company’s intellectual and brand assets to develop new products and services
• How to lay the ground work for new marketing campaigns, targeting new customers in new markets (with more favorable competitive conditions)
• How to expand globally
• Rethinking our companies’ organizational charts (and rewriting job descriptions)
• How to access outsourced and virtual pools of human talent to scale quicker and more cost-effectively
• Re-languaging our organizations’ value propositions (More pithily describing the features and benefits of our product and service offerings)
• Redrafting our mission and vision statements (and by so doing re-motivating and re-focusing ourselves and our organizations)
• And perhaps most importantly, defining with a laser like precision The Exit Plan for our organizations and for everyone in it (and getting out of No Man’s Land!)
Figuring out how to pursue opportunities and how to overcome challenges like these is almost always best done with a Start at the End approach: visioning out to the future and working backward from there.
How far to look out? I think Three Years is best.
It is long enough to get to that space of the “unbounded future” (reflect on being three years older than you are right now), while being short enough that the projects and action items arrived at very much need to be “gotten after” right away.
So, let’s all use this special time of year to reflect longer term on our more idealistic and on our bigger opportunities…
…the pursuit of which will transform our sometimes humble and prosaic day-to-day work into something far more profound.
A legacy.
Happy Holidays to You and Yours!
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The Three Year Plan
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