Customizing Your Plans for Future Successes: Keep it Real!
Setting Attainable Goals for Corporate Growth
A common goal among all businesses, regardless of size, is to grow and prosper. This will require a well-researched and carefully executed plan based on each business’s unique environment.
If I could develop a plan that would universally assure prosperity and growth for any business, I would never have to work again.
Every organization has a culture that is truly their own. This creates great diversity in every industry. Smaller organizations, as well as large corporations, co-exist in any industry.
Growth and profitability are common threads among both small and large organizations. These activities must take many factors into account.
Shooting for the stars will cause you to come crashing back to earth. However, not aiming high enough will stop you from getting into orbit. There is a fine line, which, as we walk will lead to corporate success.
What Defines an Attainable Plan
Any organization, with the proper time investment and research done early on, can establish a practical and attainable plan to move forward and grow.
Challenges to Building Future Success
Every organization has its own unique set of available resources. Identifying and categorizing them accurately is critical.
A plan for corporate success will require identifying not only the strengths but also the weaknesses unique to that group.
The first step in any future planning is to review past efforts. This needs to be done honestly, with the mindset that past efforts are, regardless of success, lessons learned for the future.
The mindset of those planning for future progress must be open to accepting that they may have been involved in past less than successful efforts.
Keeping Your Future Growth Plans Achievable
Every organization has a management plan and corporate culture all their own. Then there are the OG’s (original gangsters), having been the company’s backbone for many years, who have seen many changes in this culture. As new faces join the group, differing mindsets will undoubtedly be considered.
Another factor to consider is data management. You cannot reliably jump into cloud computing and AI with a shaky infrastructure or poor data management plan.
Fine-tuning an organization’s future will require considering all this and honestly evaluating each of these things on their own merit and reliability.
The OG’s will not embrace AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its benefits, as will the new hires. The new hires, typically of the “Google it” mindset, will not want to know the old-school method of solving an issue.
If the corporate mindset only embraces the future as the end-all, as many organizations do in a cookie-cutter plan, there will not be much success.
In the same way, not accepting the experience of senior employee solutions will overlook tried and true methodology. Alienating either end of the employee spectrum will be an instant failure.
Creating a committee to blend experience levels and new and old technologies is a solid start. A word of caution is in order, however. Every committee member will have an additional potentially dissenting opinion to deal with.
Keeping to key people is best, with these key people bringing the feedback of their respective co-workers to the table.
Conclusion
In today’s ever-changing environment, achieving forward progress can be challenging. Having been in the design industry for forty years, I have seen many changes. I have been part of some and excluded from some, depending on my employer at the time.
The biggest roadblock I have seen is an organization not being open to an idea or feedback from its internal resources.
The mindset that “this plan worked for other people means that it is best for us too” has led to more internal dissension and confusion than anything else.
Realizing that your organization is not the same as the next. and learning your weaknesses and strong points is imperative. Your unique staff and corporate structure must be the basis of how you develop forward-thinking plans.
Any plan that is established must also be a living process. Regular review of progress and issues developed must be part of the plan. Just look at how COVID upended things.
Having a dynamic and open mindset will allow your resources, as they change and mature over time, to keep your business moving forward and grow as the industry expands, even with the volatile environment we are currently in.
