Coach Jim Muir’s No Goal Method for Business Planning

Coach Jim Muir’s No Goal Method for Business Planning

Goals and objectives, business plans, and strategies are always the first recommendation of any business guru or experienced business management person.  So why do these recommendations always fail?  Dan Waldschmidt, Edgy Conversations says “When you don’t act with purpose you end up doing something stupid.”  He believes the intention is missing.  (http://www.businessinsider.com/why-your-business-plans-fail-2013-2) 

And he’s not alone.  I have been an entrepreneur and businessman.  I have also worked in the nonprofit realm as an HR Manager for 17 years.  I have seen every kind of plan from business plans to strategic plans with marketing plans, staffing plans, and intervention plans in-between.  More often than not, I confess, the plans get scrapped as soon as they are produced (oh, the wasted time, you have no idea – or maybe you do know how much time is wasted on these “strategic plans”).  Plans are like budgets: necessary fiction.  Necessary only because they are often “required” by some entity that controls money or time.  If however, you really have passion to do some thing – a business or a creation of your choice, skip the formal plans and play on the passion.  You have to cycle through constantly.  You must refresh your passion and rethink everything every day you work on it.  Instead of budgeting, create a cash flow spreadsheet that contains real income and expenses, and track it.  It’s better than any budget because it is “what is so”.  Every day has next actions.  Every day has imagination about what it’s like playing and winning the game.  Every day is a review of your passion. 

I know this all sounds counterintuitive.  And I am not advocating any endeavor which ignores critical or key documentation or financial management.  I am just advocating taking the drudgery of planning, strategic planning, and such nonsense out of the equation.  If you have to put those elements in , figure out how to have that happen without you investing your passion time in it.  Be a maverick; hire someone else to do the dreaded business plans.  They are all phony creations anyway – but sometimes they are “necessary fiction” for banks and investment firms to approve loans and financing.

You, yourself?  You are following your passion, doing what you want to do.  And if you want to win the game, keep cycling on the road of passion for what you want to do.  Get off the hamster wheel (budgets, plans, strategies that measure the past) and get on the cycle where the road goes to the uncertain future and enjoy the ride as an adventure.  That way, playing the game (the journey) makes it worthwhile to keep cycling. 

What I learned today - about Scores, Targets, Comparisons, Goals & Strategies doesn't hold water.

Keeping score, in many cases, is a really bad idea – except when we are playing a game.  It means giving up arbitrary targets too.  Keeping score on relationships is toxic.  Keeping score in business is ok as long as it is something you can actually count except if you are comparing. 

Comparing ourselves to others – is always a bad idea. Comparison in general is best left to measuring objects and things not humans.  Leave it to science and get out of the comparison business (unless you are working in science).

Zapping bad habits is easiest when we are mindfully engaged with our everyday things.  The secret to willpower is physical exercise and what it does to the front part of the cerebral cortex when we regularly exercise.

Setting goals and objectives or setting resolutions or targets and tracking those is a waste of time, it disappoints, and it makes us liars and fools.  Instead set a broad intention and let the rest be your actions toward the intention without all the busy work of trying to track and document the minutae.  Be mindful instead and experience the journey with the intension firmly present.  When you select your intention, be sure it is broad enough to encompass everything you seek.  If you end up with more than one intention, perhaps step back and broaden the intension to swoop them up into a grand scheme so big it involves everything.

The whole idea of strategy in business is built around the false idea promoted by a Frenchman describing what Napolean was doing in battle.  The false part of that is that Napoleon simply set out to win battles and when he saw the opportunity he organized himself around winning.  He didn’t set the strategy first.  Military science then picked up the false idea and the idea then became a predominant aspect in business in the 20^th century.  Now whole businesses operate on building strategy first and then execution.  They forget to look and see if the battle is winnable and they miss the whole point of strategy.  No wonder so many goals and objectives get left in the archives unmet and so many people are unemployed.

Drink Lots of Fresh, Filtered Water.