Death to the ‘Business Plan’
My column in the newspaper ABC of this week titles “Death to the Business Plan“, and explains one of the conversations that had with Jack Welch does a time about as it had to manage the previous document to mount a business. Welch Is considered the best CEO of the history and his career endorses a capacity to turn into a machine to do money companies with doubts on his immediate future. The article relates the part of this man ensures that there are not new ideas neither that these can be feasible to generate other brilliant, that all is invented. I am still in disagreement with him, but if I understand which is the engine of the innovation for his generation. Now well, when Welch ensures that the Business Plan, the plan of business of all the life, is a false argument for investors, that does not serve to direct a company and that is used to to be, in the times that we live, energy non exploit, I am entirely of agreement. I leave you with the article that complement with another text in this regard already published previously.
I knew to Jack Welch does some years. My luck! I shared with the best CEO of the 20th century some hours in Capri during some days on New Economy. I remember the debate that produced when finalising the event, during an informal meeting. While I defended that the most important in a business project were the ideas and the plan of business that would carry it to destination, he ensured me that the great ideas do not exist” and that “the business plan would have to eradicate it”. On the ideas (great) defended that these do not exist and that everything is invented. It bore it on the curious structuralist theory of the tales of Vladimir Propp. According to this, there is 30 and some diagrams inside which is possible in any tale, history or novel that we have written or narrated. Boy knows girl, transgression, go far, proof of the hero and other so many that go combining to generate all the literature existent. The same succes with the innovation, said. Everything is invented and the fascinating thing is the efficient combination of these factors.
Over time I have discovered that the most intense effort roots in the research of a problem. I thought that if it wanted big profits, had to solve big problems. If it happened him to Steve Jobs why can not happen you to you?. In place to think in a big product that went back to position to Apple in the technological head, Jobs devoted to investigate “the big problem”. The puzzle that located situated to the industry of the music in the sight. Like the record industry and authors did not attain to surpass the failure that supposed the massive and free download. It thought in iTunes and created a portal where brushed the chain of traditional value in the business. It did it betting by the problem and delivering the solution: 99 cents of dollar by song. It attained it because it did not have another remedy. If Steve Jobs there was lose in base to a Plan of Business, had contributed his plan B, C, D or others until reaching a solution. It had attained it because there was elected very well the problem.
The business Plan is not more than an option of route, a line that explains us where are and as we think to attain it, no what go to attain. Welch Said me in the airport of Naples, two days afterwards, that the error was not the model of entrepreneur and the dependency of his plan director, according to him, the disparate that commit the Europeans is that “they always expect that the governments lead the economy”. They do not think in the problem, only in the plan of the business. He took his private jet and I expected in the VIP lounge of GroundForce a time more to that my Airbus 321 took me out of there. I reviewed my Mac and commanded to the bin some only “idea” and turned it into recyclable digital paper.
