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Guest post by: Bruce Razban Become an Author

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Business and management have always required planning. Many leaders have described it this way:

• General Patton said that a plan has to be so simple and communicated so well that everyone from Generals to Foot Soldiers should know it by heart.
• There is a management saying that people do not fail, they fail to plan.

The Super Ball Champions, San Francisco 49ers NFL Football team, and their coach Bill Walsh always had a Game Plan in their pockets. All his players knew this plan very well. Joe Montana the Quarterback and Jerry Rice seldom had to exchange any words with Walsh during the game. The comprehensive plan left very little room for confusion or errors. Having these game plans was a major factor that made 49ers champions.

In business, a game plan or road map has to have:

• Tangible, measurable, observable goals,
• It has to clearly indicate who does what, when, and how,
• It always has to have Plan A, Plan B which is simply the contingency plan,
• Plan has to have been put together with the entire team participation from the beginning to the end,
• Plan has to have flexibility to handle unexpected situations,
• Plan has to be easy to communicate and understand,
• Plan has to be able to capture and act on feedback, in other words, it has to be adaptive.

Best plans are composed of two plans:

• Strategic, or the long term,
• Tactical or day-to-day,
• The above two plans have to be living documents that synchronize, cooperate, and complement each other,
• A great deal of care has to go in change control to keep these living documents real time and accurate.

Total Business Plan must be the over-riding roll-up document that dictates strategic and tactical plans based on market share, revenue forecasts, and ROI.

In my thirty-two years of business and management experience, I have learned, and relearned the lesson that people do not fail, they just fail to plan!

As the famous coach Yogi Berra had said, "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there."

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