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What should you look for when you examine your environment?
You should attempt to determine your customers’ expectations and their perception of your performance. You should keep abreast of technological developments like electronic mail and other alternative ways of doing your job. You should evaluate the performance of your vendors. You should also evaluate the performance of other groups in the organization to which you belong. Does some other group (like the traffic department) affect how well you can do your work? Can that group meet your needs?
you need to examine it in two time frames—now, and sometime in the future...
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What do my customers want f...
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What will they expect from me one y...
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The second step of planning is to determine your present status. You do this by listing your present capabilities and the projects you have in the works.
your work-in-process should be listed as partially completed product designs. You also need to look at timing; namely, when will these projects come out of your “pipeline”?
some will get scrapped or aborted, and you have to factor this into your forecasted output.
it is prudent to factor in some percentage of loss for managerial projects
The final step of planning consists of undertaking new tasks or modifying old ones to close the gap between your environmental demand and what your present activities will yield.
The first question is, What do you need to do to close the gap?
The second is, What can you do to c...
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then decide what you actually will do, evaluating what effect your actions will have on n...
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The set of actions you decide upon is ...
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The key to both Bruce’s and Cindy’s efforts is that their planning produced tasks that had to be performed now in order to affect future events.
today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.
as you plan you must answer the question: What do I have to do today to solve—or better, avoid—tomorrow’s problem?
the true output of the planning process is the set of tasks it causes to be implemented.
At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off.
But what is really being influenced here?
It is the next year—and only th...
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keep in mind that you implement only that portion of a plan that lies within the time window between now and the next time you go through the exercise.
Who should be involved in the planning process? The operating management of the organization.
remember that by saying “yes”—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.
People who plan have to have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initiate them, to shake their heads “no” as well as to smile “yes.”
If you don’t know where you’re going, you will not get there.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
Where do I want to go?
How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there?
(The answer gives us milestones, or key results.)
MBO is largely designed to provide feedback relevant to the specific task at hand;
it should tell us how we are doing so we can make adjustments in whatever we are doing
The one thing an MBO system should provide par excellence is focus.
A few extremely well-chosen objectives impart a clear message about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to—
Accordingly, to be useful a key result must contain very specific wording and dates, so that when deadline time arrives, there is no room for ambiguity.
the mission-oriented organization (a), which is completely decentralized,
the totally functional organization (b), which is completely centralized.
We are a hybrid organization. Our hybrid nature comes from the fact that the form of the overall corporate organization results from a mix of the business divisions, which are mission-oriented, and the functional groups.
some of the advantages of organizing so much of the company in such groups?
first is the economies of scale that can be achieved.
Another important advantage is that resources can be shifted and reallocated to respond to changes in corporate-wide priorities.
Intel’s functional groups allow the business units to concentrate on mastering their specific trades
Having so much of Intel organized in functional units also has its disadvantages.
The most important is the information overload hitting a functional group when it must respond to the demands made on it by diverse and numerous business units.
some of the advantages of organizing much of a company in a mission-oriented form?
There is only one. It is that the individual units can stay in touch with the needs of their business or product areas and initiate changes rapidly when those needs change.
Here I would like to propose Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.
They ended up forming an executive committee that would not interfere with the legal (mission-oriented) work of the individual attorneys but would address the acquisition and allocation of common, shared resources.
Small organization developing jnternal functional organization to allow individuals to perform their missions without the distraction of office logistics.
The only exceptions that come to my mind are conglomerates,
Why are they an exception to our rule? Because they do not have a common business purpose.
