The Management Process: Planning

Planning

Without a plan, it’s hard to succeed at anything. The reason is simple: if you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t move forward. Successful managers decide where they want to be and then figure out how to get there; they set goals and determine the best way to achieve them. As a result of the planning process, everyone in the organization knows what should be done, who should do it, and how to do it.

Developing a Strategic Plan

Coming up with an idea—say, starting a note-taking business—is a good start, but it’s only a start. Planning for it is a step forward. Planning begins at the highest level and works its way down through the organization. Step one is usually called strategic planning: the process of establishing an overall course of action. To begin this process, you should ask yourself a couple of very basic questions: why, for example, does the organization exist? What value does it create? Sam Walton posed these questions in the process of founding Wal-Mart: his new chain of stores would exist to offer customers the lowest prices with the best possible service.^[1]

Once you’ve identified the purpose of your company, you’re ready to take the remaining steps in the strategic-planning process:

• Write a mission statement that tells customers, employees, and others why your organization exists.
• Identify core values or beliefs that will guide the behavior of members of the organization.
• Assess the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Establish goals and objectives, or performance targets, to direct all the activities that you’ll perform to achieve your mission.
• Develop and implement tactical and operational plans to achieve goals and objectives.

In the next few sections, we’ll examine these components of the strategic-planning process.

Mission Statement

As we saw in an earlier chapter, the mission statement describes the purpose of your organization—the reason for its existence. It tells the reader what the organization is committed to doing. It can be very concise, like the one from Mary Kay Inc. (the cosmetics company): “To enrich the lives of women and their families around the world.”^[2] Or it can be as detailed as the one from Harley-Davidson: “More than building machines, we stand for timeless pursuit of adventure. Freedom for the soul.”^[3]

A mission statement for Notes-4-You could be the following: “To provide high-quality class notes to college students.” On the other hand, you could prepare a more detailed statement that explains what the company is committed to doing, who its customers are, what its focus is, what goods or services it provides, and how it serves its customers.

It is worth noting that some companies no longer use mission statements, preferring to communicate their reason for being in other manners.

Core Values

Whether or not your company has defined a mission, it is important to identify what your organization stands for in terms of its values and the principles that will guide its actions. In the chapter, “Business Ethics and Social Responsibility”, we explained that the small set of guiding principles that you identify as crucial to your company are known as core values—fundamental beliefs about what’s important and what is and isn’t appropriate in conducting company activities. Core values affect the overall planning processes and operations. At Volvo, five values— customer success, trust, passion, change, and performance—  are the major force in guiding the firm’s “day-to-day behaviour and drive their decision-making at all levels of the organization.”^[4] Core values should also guide the behavior of every individual in the organization. At Coca-Cola, for instance, the values of leadership, collaboration, integrity, accountability, passion, diversity and quality tell employees exactly what behaviors are acceptable.^[5] Companies communicate core values to employees and hold them accountable for putting them into practice by linking their values to performance evaluations and compensation.

In choosing core values for Notes-4-You, you’re determined to be unique. After some thought, you settle on teamwork, trust, and dependability. Why these three? As you plan your business, you realize that it will need a workforce that functions as a team, trusts each other, and can be depended on to satisfy customers. In building your workforce, you’ll seek employees who’ll embrace these values.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis

The next step in the strategic-planning process is to assess your company’s fit with its environment. A common approach to environmental analysis is matching the strengths of your business with the opportunities available to it. It’s called SWOT analysis because it calls for analyzing an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The next two paragraphs of this video explain the ins and outs of a SWOT analysis.

Hint: Use the cog to increase the speed; the video is a tad slow-moving.

It begins with an examination of external factors that could influence the company in either a positive or a negative way. These could include economic conditions, competition, emerging technologies, laws and regulations, and customers’ expectations.

One purpose of assessing the external environment is to identify both opportunities that could benefit the company and threats to its success. For example, a company that manufactures children’s bicycle helmets would view a change in federal law requiring all children to wear helmets as an opportunity. The news that two large sports-equipment companies were coming out with bicycle helmets would be a threat.

The next step is to evaluate the company’s strengths and weaknesses, internal factors that could influence company performance in either a positive or negative way. Strengths might include a motivated workforce, state-of-the-art technology, impressive managerial talent, or a desirable location. The opposite of any of these strengths could signal a potential weakness (poor workforce, obsolete technology, incompetent management, or poor location). Armed with a good idea of internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats, managers will be better positioned to capitalize on opportunities and strengths. Likewise, they want to improve on any weak areas and protect the organization from external threats.

For example, Notes-4-You might say that by providing excellent service at a reasonable price while we’re still small, it can solidify its position on campus. When the market grows due to increases in student enrollment, the company will have built a strong reputation and be in a position to grow. So even if a competitor comes to campus (a threat), the company expects to be the preferred supplier of class notes. This strategy will work only if the note-takers are dependable and if the process does not alienate the faculty or administration.

Set Goals

Your mission statement affirms what your organization is generally committed to doing, but it doesn’t tell you how to do it. So the next step in the strategic-planning process is establishing goals and objectives. Goals are major accomplishments that the company wants to achieve over a long period. In order to challenge and yet manage, SMART is an often-applied acronym that guides the development of goals. A SMART goal is one that is:

Specific: The who, what, where, when, why, and the which involved with the goal. Define the goal as much as possible with no ambiguous language.

Measurable: Can you track the progress and measure the outcome? How much, how many, how will I know when my goal is accomplished?

Attainable: Is the goal reasonable enough to be accomplished? Make sure the goal is not out of reach or below standard performance.

Relevant:  Is the goal worthwhile and will it meet your and your organization’s needs? Is each goal consistent with other established goals, plans, and timelines?

Timely: Your goal should include a time limit. It will establish a sense of urgency and prompt better time management.

Set objectives

Objectives are shorter-term performance targets that direct the activities of the organization toward the attainment of a goal. They should be clearly stated, achievable, and measurable: they should give target dates for the completion of tasks and stipulate who’s responsible for taking necessary actions.^[6]

 An organization will have a number of goals and related objectives. Some will focus on financial measures, such as profit maximization and sales growth. Others will target operational efficiency or quality control. Still, others will govern the company’s relationships with its employees, its community, its environment, or all three.

Finally, goals and objectives change over time. As a firm reassesses its place in its business environment, it rethinks not only its mission but also its approach to fulfilling it. The reality of change was a major theme when the late McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo explained his goal to revitalize the company:

“The world has changed. Our customers have changed. We have to change too. Growth comes from being better, not just expanding to have more restaurants. The new McDonald’s is focused on building sales at existing restaurants rather than on adding new restaurants. We are introducing a new level of discipline and efficiency to all aspects of the business and are setting a new bar for performance.”^[7]

This change in focus was accompanied by specific performance objectives—annual sales growth of 3 to 5 percent and income growth of 6 to 7 percent at existing restaurants, plus a five-point improvement (based on customer surveys) in speed of service, friendliness, and food quality.

In setting strategic goals and performance objectives for Notes-4-You, you should keep things simple. Because you need to make money to stay in business, you could include a financial goal (and related objectives). Your mission statement promises “high-quality, dependable, competitively priced class notes,” so you could focus on the quality of the class notes that you’ll be taking and distributing. Finally, because your mission is to serve students, one goal could be customer-oriented. Your list of goals and objectives might look like this:

• Goal 1: Achieve a 10 percent return on profits in your first five years.

• Objective: Sales of $20,000 and profit of $2,000 for the first 12 months of operation.

• Goal 2: Produce a high-quality product.

• Objective: First-year satisfaction scores of 90 percent or higher on quality of notes (based on survey responses on understandability, readability, and completeness).

• Goal 3: Attain 98 percent customer satisfaction by the end of your fifth year.

• Objective: Making notes available within two days after class, 95 percent of the time.

Consider how SMART these goals and objectives are.

Tactical Plans

The overall plan is broken down into more manageable, shorter-term components called tactical plans. These plans specify the activities and allocation of resources (people, equipment, money) needed to implement the strategic plan over a given period. Often, a long-range strategic plan is divided into several tactical plans; a five-year strategic plan, for instance, might be implemented as five one-year tactical plans.

Operational Plans

The tactical plan is then broken down into various operational components that provide detailed action steps to be taken by individuals or groups to implement the tactical and strategic plans. Operational plans cover only a brief period—say, a month or two. At Notes-4-You, note-takers might be instructed to submit typed class notes five hours earlier than normal on the last day of the semester (an operational guideline). The goal is to improve the customer satisfaction score on dependability (a tactical goal) and, as a result, to earn the loyalty of students through attention to customer service (a strategic goal).

Plan for Contingencies and Crises

Even with great planning, things don’t always turn out the way they’re supposed to. Perhaps your plans were flawed, or maybe something in the environment shifted unexpectedly. Successful managers anticipate and plan for the unexpected. Dealing with uncertainty requires contingency planning and crisis management.

Contingency Planning

With contingency planning, managers identify those aspects of the business that are most likely to be adversely affected by change. Then, they develop alternative courses of action in case an anticipated change does occur. You engage in contingency planning any time you develop a backup or fallback plan.

Crisis Management

Organizations also face the risk of encountering crises that require immediate attention. Rather than waiting until such a crisis occurs and then scrambling to figure out what to do, many firms practice crisis management. Some, for instance, set up teams trained to deal with emergencies. Members gather information quickly and respond to the crisis while everyone else carries out his or her normal duties. The team also keeps the public, the employees, the press, and government officials informed about the situation and the company’s response to it.

An example of how to handle crisis management involves Wendy’s. After learning that a woman claimed she found a fingertip in a bowl of chili she bought at a Wendy’s restaurant in San Jose, California, the company’s public relations team responded quickly. Within a few days, the company announced that the finger didn’t come from an employee or a supplier. Soon after, the police arrested the woman and charged her with attempted grand larceny for lying about how the finger got in her bowl of chili and trying to extort $2.5 million from the company. But the crisis wasn’t over for Wendy’s. The incident was plastered all over the news as a grossed-out public sought an answer to the question, “Whose finger is (or was) it?” A $100,000 reward was offered by Wendy’s to anyone with information that would help the police answer this question. The challenge Wendy’s faced was how to entice customers to return to its fifty San Francisco–area restaurants (where sales had plummeted) while keeping a low profile nationally. Wendy’s accomplished this objective by giving out free milkshakes and discount coupons to customers in the affected regions and, to avoid calling attention to the missing finger, by making no changes in its national advertising. The crisis-management strategy worked and the story died down (though it flared up temporarily when the police arrested the woman’s husband, who allegedly bought the finger from a coworker who had severed it in an accident months earlier).^[8]

Even with crisis-management plans in place, however, it’s unlikely that most companies will emerge from a potentially damaging episode as unscathed as Wendy’s did. For one thing, the culprits in Wendy’s case were caught, and the public was willing to forgive an organization it viewed as a victim. Given the current public distrust of corporate behaviour, however, companies whose reputations have suffered due to questionable corporate judgment usually don’t fare as well.

Consider how this crisis from 2005 would have played out differently in today’s media culture and climate. The more recent example from 2017, provides a glimpse. Pepsi seemed to miss a lot of red flags when it created its campaign based on peace and understanding, set against a backdrop of protest against police brutality. Within minutes after the promotion was released, users of social media called for an immediate boycott against Pepsi and accused the company of undermining the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as exploiting it to sell products. Pepsi apologized and removed the ad, but it lived on in social media. See different collections of the Twitter backlash; Twitter is tearing apart Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad. ^[9][10]