My godfather, friend, and mentor – Mr. Rene Lamzon – who works as consultant for various organizations called me one time asking me to remind him of certain sections of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley (a story about the success of Microsoft and Apple Computers). I asked him why and he told me that it’s for one of the projects that he’s working on that’s related to planning.
A few days after, I paid him a visit to ask him to critique on of the business plans that I have in mind. We had some healthy discussion and eventually we talked about his project. This is where I learned about the Four Methods of Planning and I have to admit that it changed the way I think on how I should write my business plans.
I can’t really tell it any better than he did so I’ll just summarize these four of methods of planning below:
- Inactive Planning – there is actually no planning involved and you just go along with the flow. This is actually the worst thing that a ‘planner’ can do.
- Reactive Planning – a plan is made only in reaction to some event or circumstance which triggered the need to actually create a plan. In other words, the damage has already been done well before the plan was made. This helps only in preventing the same problem from occuring in the future.
- Pre-active Planning – the planner anticipates for the future and creates a plan according to how he predicts the future will happen. Most planners use this method and it works quite well. The problem with this method though is that one doesn’t really know what will actually happen in the future and thus only anticipations are made.
- Pro-active Planning – in this case, the planner designs his future. He decides what he wants to happen in the future and makes it happen. This way, the planner doesn’t have to worry much on whether the future that he has in mind will happen because is quite certain that it will. This method is the best but is also the most difficult. The best people I can think of who does this are the chess players. Good chess players actually force their opponents to move according to their plan.
After hearing Mr. Lamzon’s explanation, I immediately learned that I’m not actually doing any ‘real’ planning at all. That I am – in reality – just a reactive planner. Discovering this, I immediately set my mind to be a pro-active planner or if that’s too tough for me to tackle at the moment, to at least be a pre-active planner.
I couldn’t thank Ninong Rene more than I could ever imagine. This changed my way of thinking.
As of now, Mr. Rene Lamzon is still in the process of finalizing his project and knowing him, I expect him to come up with more great ideas in the future. Meantime, if you’re running a business or planning to start one, I would recommend that you read some books on business planning
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