Year End Plans

Q3 is always a period of flurry in the company. It’s also when the Business HR team puts its head together to come up with the strategy for the next year and accordingly set budgets. It’s that time of the year when dozens of powerpoint presentations float around, calendars are booked, people are constantly in a hurry and busy pretending to be busy. I say pretending with a reason, and the reason is this –

I took a look at last year’s final start plan and less than 30% had been accomplished and no one was reprimanded. Why?

I am just quoting my company as an example. I’ve seen it happen in companies all over the world. Some deadlines are always stretching. We at least come up with an ambitious plan. If we were to achieve even 70% of it, we would probably one of the world’s most progressive companies. I do not complain about the 70% which we’ve not achieved, but I cry over the ideas that have faded away and the year we just lost because of the complacency in the work place.

I mentioned this book in one of my earlier post and I will mention it again because it’s a good read. I believe that every company needs to constantly evolve and it needs to do so at great speed.  If I could hand every leader one book every quarter, it would be ‘ a Sense of Urgency’ by John Kotter during the planning phase.

Sit back and reflect at the ideas that were generated in the last planning cycle. How many task forces and hours were booked off your calendar? Did you make over 5 versions of your presentation and label them 1.1, 1.2, 1.3…only to see them get lost amongst multiple files on someone’s system?

Being a location HR now, I have been asked to present radical ideas along with the usual ‘what we can do’. I am still weighing out my ideas to see if any can be called radical, but yes, first I’d like to see the smaller, implementable ones take shape. The management committee needs to see that they don’t have the next five years to change things. We need to change and NOW!

Is your company complacent or creating a false sense of urgency? How effective is your planning cycle? How creative do you get?