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 is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Your margin is my opportunity.
It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
I think I've realized that business and being polite [don't] match. You can be fair, but me being polite was not me being fair to myself.
I think that, too many times, business has been seen as acting in its narrow self-interest rather than, essentially, contributing more broadly to society. I think a lot of that is unintentional; I don't think that many managers are deliberately trying to be unethical or are not trying to be sensitive to social needs.
When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.
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