Business Planning: Trends That Make The Old Way Obsolete

The old way of writing a business plan was born at a different time in a world that hardly resembles the world we work in today. While old style business plans have some validity and are required for things like attracting venture capital or securing a line of credit or funds from a lending institution, what most business leaders are looking for today is something that is faster, more pertinent to their daily actions, and helps get them and their employees get focused on things that really matter.

Here are just a few trends that make the old style of business planning obsolete:

• Business change cycles shrinking from 6 years down to 6-18 months
• Major technology innovations and shifts every 8 months
• Power shifts from the corporate marketing department to the consumer
• Very low cost of entry due to cheap, plentiful and powerful business and communication tools
• Viral marketing through social media
• Cheap, global reach using the Internet

These trends have changed the face of business forever rendering the old style of business planning obsolete and ineffective. For each of the trends above there are pertinent implications for business leaders, solopreneurs, authors, consultants and coaches. The problem is that because the old business planning tools have such a bad reputation today (and don’t work anymore) the same players above have embraced no planning tools at all bringing about loads of frustration, wasted fortunes, and burn out.

In the next series of posts we’ll explore the implications of each trend resulting in what to look for in an effective planning method that works in our business world today. We’ll end by showing there is something between the old style way and no planning at all.