Philip Walcoff - "The Fast Forward MBA in Business Planning for ...

Philip Walcoff - "The Fast Forward MBA in Business Planning for Growth"Page 137applicable, your senior staff need to commit to accomplishing these critical action items. Remember,getting these important things accomplished has big payoffs in the end, such as meeting your annualobjectives, having a good year, and being on the way toward eventually achieving your vision of yourorganization.Don't Maintain Two To-Do ListsIf you get your management staff involved in the plan, each manager will have responsibility forachieving certain objectives, and their action items should be added to their own to-do lists. I have seentoo many cases where the CEO and the senior management team maintain two to-do lists: The first is alist they normally use to manage their time and run the business, and the second is their business planaction item list. This approach will surely set the stage for ushering in a key reason that business plansfail, as stated in Chapter 1: The plan action items lack priority. With two lists, you create theopportunity to do the planning action items later, when things lighten up—a sure-fire recipe forensuring that the action items won't get done.Don't Get Bogged down in Day-to-Day DetailsThe action plan reviews should not include ordinary day-to-day business activities such as closing asale, ordering inventory, or getting payroll out. This will bog down the review session. Focus on thosenecessary activities that support the achievement of your annual objectives.EXERCISE 41: DEFINE YOUR ACTION PLANREVIEW DATESSelect which days of the month (e.g., first and third Mondaysfor semimonthly reviews or every Friday for weekly reviews)and the time of day when you will hold your action planreviews. Give yourself an action item to hold your first actionplan review. Enter the date and time in your business plan'saction plan (see Appendix B).file:///C|/Documents and Settings/gasanova/Local Setti...orward_MBA_in_Business_Planning_for_Growth/e-book.html (152 of 219)16.02.2005 13:54:23