Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I'd toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.
Interpretation
Planning long-term can be unrealistic due to unforeseen changes in business conditions.
Mark McCormack emphasizes the unpredictability of future business conditions, suggesting that rigid long-term planning is often futile. He argues that anyone who believes they can accurately predict the state of their business or the market five years ahead is disregarding the dynamic nature of the environment they've chosen to operate within.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing strategic planning.
There are two kinds of businesses: The first earns 12%, and you can take it out at the end of the year. The second earns 12%, but all the excess cash must be reinvested - there's never any cash. It reminds me of the guy who looks at all of his equipment and says, 'There's all of my profit.' We hate that kind of business.
Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.
Helping doing business easier, we choose the name Alibaba because it is a global company. It is founded in China, but it was created for the world.
Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.
Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.
To those who are engaged in commercial dealings, justice is indispensable for the conduct of business.
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