The Art Behind the Business

What breaks or makes a success? Do you know? Can you tell if you are going in the right direction? ‘Here she goes again on KPIs!’ Not today, that is second derivative of this. Today the question is more fundamental than this. You have a strategy, you have your priorities or areas of focus. But do you know what it takes to get there? Of course I do, isn’t that obvious It is less than obvious really. As an example, at A Little Gesture, our mission is to promote the improvement of living condition for underprivileged children and their families in Mozambique. We believe that access to education and nutrition will help them break the inter generational cycle of poverty. We want to be out of business one day . But how? What do I need to get right - when do you get down to details? It is not about establishing 3 pre schools or sponsoring 800 children, but rather the activities that get me there: I need funding I need to find new donours every year: this mea...

Today I break my original plan to do a series on performance metrics as a topic has been lingering on my mind for a few days. Or shall I say a frustration instead.  It is clear by now I am a believer in business planning for established businesses, but mostly I am a believer in establishing goals, a direction and a way to measure progress on them, in order to evaluate late surprises. My view is not necessarily a shared view. In many places, business planning is a tick the box exercise that people need to deal with because management says so. And they go through it as fast and disconnected as they can.  As a new business planning cycle begins, I can feel the angst already. The rolling of the eyes as a new template goes out and the inevitable question of ‘why do we need all this’. There were moments in the past where I thought I was not really a strategist but rather a document producing machine. I too faced my own set planning cycles and wondered, I too challenged the...

Everyone talks about them - large or small businesses, established or start-up companies. I had a conversation today about how some new products got established without ever having made it to paper-  so are business plans really needed? Aren’t we just adding un-necessary burdens and governance layers when we want is to be lean, fail fast and keep going? Isn’t lean the new black and business plans so 2 seasons ago? Not quite. Business plans serve different purposes in different organisations but there are commonalities in what they are able to achieve. It is not about the piece of paper or even necessarily the meeting in which they get presented if any, it is not even about the dollar forecast one puts in there. Time. Business plans create time. No, they don’t have the magic power to make a CEO day any longer, rather the reverse as most people will work on a business plan on top of their ‘day job’. But they create the most rare kind of time - time away from working IN th...