[One Sip of a Book] "The Basics of Planning Are Clear Messages"

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly resonate with the reader’s heart, creating a connection with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor’s note

Even if you have a good idea, if it does not align with the organization or business direction, it is nothing more than mere imagination. A good plan must persuade both the organization and the customers to survive. The author, who has been in charge of strategic planning at a consumer goods company for 13 years, says that the ‘strategic planning framework’ that suggests the direction the company should take must be applied to work. Based on four core frameworks?‘the eye to read the company’s board,’ ‘logical thinking,’ ‘market analysis skills,’ and ‘a process that speaks in numbers’?the book introduces secrets to maximizing productivity, performance, and evaluation. Drawing on questions received during a six-year series on Kakao Brunch, it kindly contains useful techniques that can be immediately applied in practice, such as how to write reports that pass at once, how to push work forward quickly, how to utilize data, and how planners should study.

By looking at the organizational chart over several years, you can clearly understand what the company aims for. The company classifies its business using the classic ‘BCG Matrix’ and moves resources strictly according to the promised method. Financial details like budgets or investments are difficult to know at an individual level, but it is easy to grasp how many people have decreased or increased.

Simply put, even if an organization currently has a large profit margin, if it is deprioritized in future plans, the number of people is reduced; conversely, an organization with low current profits but high future investment potential continues to increase its personnel. You can objectively understand the position of the organization you belong to within the company by observing changes in members over several years.

The basis of planning is a clear message. When writing reports, it is ideal not to include more than two messages on one page. Even companies with in-house consulting teams, not just consulting firms like McKinsey, provide training on writing concise reports. The same applies to interviews. Defining the outcome of an interview in advance creates the power to keep the focus during all interview times and guide it in one direction. That is the root of the problem, in other words, what we are trying to find.

The details of questions may vary, but the direction pursued by the questions applies equally to my work. What must not be forgotten is ‘why we review’ external best practices. Chris Zook, a management consultant at Bain & Company, emphasizes that the significance of reviewing best practices lies in viewing the company from the market perspective, not internally.

He argues that the core principles of change are whether the company secures strategy through core competencies and differentiation ahead of competitors, whether the focus to narrow the gap between management, frontline organizations, and the market is placed externally, and whether a systematic learning system is established for acquiring, processing, and utilizing market feedback. In other words, the company must regularly train internally to digest the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis by introducing new paradigms rather than the daily thought paradigms so that it does not lose the essence it pursues: customer value.

(How Planners Work Well, written by Peter, Wiseberry)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.