As a small boat sailing vast and changeable seas, the best route to long-term success for small businesses is to concentrate on short-term goals
As I sit down to write today, it is hard to imagine what being in business actually meant in 1947, when my predecessors first started proffering their words of wisdom in the pages of Director. The post-war atmosphere of relief-laced, austere trading conditions has now been supplanted by the polar opposites of market fear and consumer hedonism. The pace and nature of business life has without question changed beyond recognition.
The inevitability of marked change makes me question the value of long-term planning in today's ever-accelerating business world. Does the ability to see into the future and to convince others of your prescience and foresight, thereby gaining their support, lie at the heart of innovation and entrepreneurship? If so, just what place does forward planning occupy in 21st-century business?
On one hand, over the last 60 years there have been some comfortingly predictable outcomes that offer a solid foundation with the past. In 1947, our railways were nationalised because they weren't up to scratch, the Germans and Japanese had just begun what now seems like their inevitable march to the top of the economic league, and the fixed footprint of our island has retained land as the asset trump suit.
Yet in 1947, though India had gained independence, even Nostradamus couldn't have predicted the scale and speed of Britain's economic and geographic shrinkage, the collapse of the Empire, and the "Balkanisation" of the Union. In a very short time, Britain went from being a global landlord to being on food coupons, and back then, only a fertile imagination could have envisaged today's abundance-fuelled consumerism. Who could have foreseen the economic impacts of mobile phones, the internet, and Elvis? We have walked on the Moon, consigned Concorde to the scrapyard, and turned talentless twits into global celebrities. Let's face it, long-term forecasting is strictly for A-list prophets.
If predicting the future is a fool's game, how can directors square the need to do so and plan to succeed, given the seeming impossibility of the task? In my early years, like many in small business, I had no idea what a business plan looked like. I was fine and dandy without one. I even took a fool's pride in the fact that I didn't need a plan, unlike those "pretend" entrepreneurs. Business is, after all, pretty easy. Sell for more than your costs, and get paid before you have to pay up. Keep it simple, right? More important, what's the point in planning five years ahead? Better off focusing on the here and now and getting that right. We can cross the Rubicon once we reach its banks.
These days, we are better prepared. We operate with a vision of where we would like to go. We have a strategy which outlines how we expect to get there, and a tactical plan which plots in detail the journey for the year ahead. I now understand that without a clear plan for the immediate future, understood by all, no business can expect to do all the right things, in the right way, and in the right order. Without a strategy that takes into regular account the key changes that can occur in the world outside, no business can be serious about winning. Bereft of a clear, worthwhile vision, every business will eventually sink.
Yet paradoxically, you have more chance of winning the lottery without buying a ticket than predicting the complex impacts that, say, global warming, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, or the emergence of "tan in a can" will have on business in 60 years time. But, based on what you already know and can expect in the next six months to a year, it's not so difficult to prepare your own boat, crew and plans.
For a small company such as ours, like a raft in a raging sea, the focus remains on reaching the next island intact and as planned; on judging the changing winds and using them again to carry us closer towards our final destination. Who knows, we may one day reach Vision Island, or we might get sunk by a freak tsunami. Nonetheless, we are determined not to perish en route because we failed to pack properly.
Alex Pratt OBE is founder of seriousreaders.com and an adviser to the government on innovation and skills.
