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

Philip Walcoff - "The Fast Forward MBA in Business Planning for Growth"The mission statement is the second element of your business plan strategy. It is really the answer to thedifficult question, "What business are you in?" This is the first question IPage 84ask my new or prospective clients, and it most often raises the response, "Now that's a good question."CEOs are typically too focused on the short-term, dealing with day-to-day issues, to really have a goodidea as to where they are going. Somebody once said, "If you don't know where you are going, how willyou know when you are lost?" Developing your mission statement gives you the opportunity todocument, in a single page, a future picture of your company. It is the necessary roadmap for knowingwhere you're going, and, as Stephen Covey says, it enables you to "begin with the end in mind."The mission statement is very strategic and describes your future company, typically 10 years fromnow. While some might think a 10 year time horizon is too long, given the rapidly changing businessenvironment, keep in mind that you need to look far enough into the future to enable you to developyour long-term strategies. Recall that you will be revisiting your strategies each year and that you canmake appropriate adjustments. In contrast to the rest of the business plan, the mission statementcontains no numbers, no measurable factors; it's very qualitative. It is a very strategic view of yourfuture company. It's really a statement of your values as applied to your company.The challenge of developing an effective business plan centers on clearly framing a response to thequestion of what business you are in. Joseph R. Mancuso points out in his book How to Start, Finance,and Manage Your Own Small Business that "the importance of the question and its subsequent answeris widely accepted as the pivotal survival issue for every small businessperson." 1 The same should besaid for medium and large businesses, as well.For example, one need only look at IBM's missing the boat on the viability of the personal computer orthe railroads' falling on their swords at the turn of the century when they chose to be in the railroadbusiness instead of the transportation business. Peter F.file:///C|/Documents and Settings/gasanova/Local Settin...Forward_MBA_in_Business_Planning_for_Growth/e-book.html (98 of 219)16.02.2005 13:54:23