Doing more; Doing more of the same; Doing just a little different
I always read Seth Godin’s blog. They entries and short, direct, to the point, and always give me something to think about.
Here is a recent posting
“I’m making money, why do more?”
Because more than you need to makes it personal.
Because work that belongs to you, by choice, is the first step to making art.
Because the choice to do more brings passion to your life and it makes you more alive.
Because if you don’t, someone else will, and in an ever more competitive world, doing less means losing.
Because you care.
Because we’re watching.
Because you can.
There is a difference between doing more and doing different.
Sometimes, doing more of the same is your biggest liability - whether its your personal life, a for-profit company, a non-profit organization, or a government agency.
I always encounter people in organizations that are intent on “doing more”. This is their biggest mistake. They do more of same expecting to get promoted. The only thing “doing more” (of the same) in non-strategic job roles is going to get them is “more of the same” since few managers will promote someone who excels at being ”a workhorse”.
Doing more (of the same) didn’t keep most traditional booksellers from going out of business. Amazon did it different. Different beat more of the same.
For non-profits, doing more of the same when the social, economic, technological, cultural and other external realities are shifting under your feet is going to send you on a trajectory of irrelevancy. Traditional organizations like the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and the ARRL faces this challenge. Do more of the same when the external context has radically changed – or do different?
NASA essentially accomplished its biggest goal in 1969 by landing a man on the moon and returning safely back to earth. What happens when you do it 6 more times? Doing more of the same triggered some scrutiny by Congress with a report saying they needed a viable strategic plan, not to do more of the same, but to do more of something different – something that can engage the national vsion. How about the US Post Office. They would like to do more of the same (delivering physical postal mail) but seemingly most of the public doesn’t need more of the same. Customers do different and the Post Office is now in decline because they are not doing different – what customers really need, want, and are willing to pay for.
The Take
Do more? Ok. But sometimes, doing more of the same is really doing less.
Doing a little different may grant you the privilege to do more of the same… Then the chance to do different again… and the process repeats.
Read more
Doing more of the same. From one of the few books on the social history of amateur Radio “Why end this book as of the year 1950? It is because the story of ham radio’s development essentially takes place in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Having been created, accepted, regulated, and achieved permanent status by 1950, the story after that becomes one primarily of repetition.” Read the posting – ARRL: Does the ARRL need a Strategic Plan?
NASA – more of the same. From the office of the Inspector General ” These problems are not primarily of NASA’s doing, but the agency could craft a better response to the uncertainty, for example, by developing a strategic plan that includes clear priorities and a transparent budget allocation process. A better response would improve NASA’s ability to navigate future obstacles and uncertainties. An effective agency response is vital, because at a time when the strategic importance of space is rising and the capabilities of other spacefaring nations are increasing, U.S. leadership is faltering….” NASA: What to do after mission accomplished
More of the same.. missing it all. Of Telegraphs, Telephones, Radios, and Organizational Momentum
Why? Group Think. The C-word: Consensus
Doing a little different – Stupid Survives until smart succeeds
Passing the time; passing away
We build our own prisons and serve as our own jail keepers, but I’ve concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us – and self-images – that hold us captive for a long time.
“There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.”– Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Sometimes I hear the expression, “Passing the time”. People are trying to find ways to “pass the time”. That is, they are bored, have nothing to do, or otherwise unmotivated to do anything. They need to find a distraction, or entertainment, something to “pass the time”… until they pass away. Life as a tragic waiting game for death.
Sometimes I hear about people who visit the doctor and they are told they have some sort of terminal illness. One of the first things they do is to catch up on their “bucket list” – do all those things they had planned on doing before the end of their life. These people are running out of time.
So, how can some people struggle to “pass the time” when they have all the time in the world while others struggle to do all they can in the limited time they have?
We only have one life. We all have limited time. Why would anyone struggle to “pass the time”?
What do jobs and the concept of education have to do with it?
Reading the Huffington Post I ran into an article about Bill Gates. The article had a quote from Gates
Gates’ belief that education is the greatest predictor of America’s future is supported by a report released last March that declared education to be an issue of national security. “A Nation at Risk,” penned by former New York City Schools chief Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, argues that a failure to provide quality education in areas like foreign languages, science and technology will create major future deficiencies of engineers, diplomats and soldiers, among others.
“As we’re not able to train people for the jobs, you’re going to hit a limit that, no matter how good the economy is, you’re not providing the opportunity,” Gates said Wednesday.
Whenever I read something like this I cringe. What always seems to be confounded in these opinions and statements is the difference between getting an education in the classical sense and getting a vocational education. Whenever you hear “job” and “education” in the same sentence think “training”. Training is not an education. Perhaps we conflate the words training and education so much we lose the distinction.
Management consultants – hands off the educational system
For all the respect I have for the consulting firm McKinsey I had to set that aside last year when I read their report “Boosting Productivity in US Higher Education”. Boosting productivity? They used terms like “unnecessary credits” as if higher education was like a factory to produce “just in time” workers for immediate deployment as dictated by what America’s corporations need today.
Why are people … Passing the time?
People who are “passing the time” are generally not working – either by choice or by circumstance. When I hear “passing the time” I get the idea that the educational system and the job market have both fulfilled their purpose and at the same time it has destroyed someone.
Note the use of the words “train people” in the quote above by Gates. Training people is like manufacturing a part (a cog) for a giant machine. I don’t think many people would identify themselves as a “cog” but that’s how most companies treat people and that’s what they are. Companies have “roles” and there is generally little problem in swapping different individuals in and out of roles (interchangeable parts). This is especially true for jobs that are non-strategic (operational, support, etc.)
So, when you are out of a job you are essentially a cog without a machine. And a cog without a machine really has no purpose or identity. Having no purpose or identify all a cog can do is “pass the time”. Opportunity? A custom manufactured cog for a particular machine in a particular era has little chance of reuse.
The Take
Too many people don’t consider the difference among education, vocational education, and training. As Gates points out, America needs people to be trained for jobs. But, unfortunately the terminal point for people “trained for jobs” will be quick obsolescence in a rapidly changing job market and/or wages reduced to poverty level to the extent that “training” is readily available to anyone producing surpluses of undifferentiated workers.
Gates’ belief that education is the greatest predictor of America’s future is supported by a report released last March that declared education to be an issue of national security.
Yes, education, not training. But the article does not make this distinction. What is important for America is not so much a ready and able”trained’ workforce to solve pressing in-demand problems of today but an educated segment that can create a tomorrow for America in the context of a global economy.
No one who is educated to “make the future” will ever have time to “pass the time”.
Training people for today’s jobs seems to be a tragic (and necessary) sacrifice of people which leaves them aimless near the end of their lives.
Read more
Re/Imagine everything – Mary Meeker 2012 Internet Trends Year-End Update – Business Insider
The Future of Digital – The Future of Digital… is not in a rear-view mirror
McKinsey – Boosting Productivity in US Higher Education
Do we want management consults messing with higher education?
Creating life strategies and the road to continuous self-renewal
Trends for society through technology: What Jay-Z knows
Mary Meeker from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins recently gave a presentation at Stanford University on the the state of the web. The slide deck is filled with industry trends and statistical data to back it up.
So, I went through the deck and if you’re paying attention to the world we live in, nothing in the deck should be a surprise to you. Every presentation of this kind is backward-looking. That is, it describes trends that everyone can observe. These sorts of presentations do not “look around corners” nor do they speculate on a discontinuous or non-linear future. Of course, these latter events in history represent the significant opportunities for society and culture.
All that being said, there is interesting trend data and statistics in Mary Meeker’s deck.
The linear societal doom
It was going good until I looked at the last few slides in the deck. One slide shows US spending on entitlements and debt as percent of GDP. Another slide shows the distribution of taxes among entitlements, defense, interest and other. The US spends 57% of taxes on entitlements. A third slide shows that entitlement and interest expense will exceed GDP by 2025.
What Jay-Z knows
We were kids without fathers… so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves. – Jay-Z
What Jay-Z knows is about peer groups. Pick your peer group, don’t let it fall to chance.
Everyone who walks on the face of the earth encounters peer groups. Each peer group has it’s own culture and set of standards. Whether you are going to be successful in life (a sort of difficult self-referential idea inside the group) depends on what peer group you hang with.
We could probably all agree that being part of the entitlement system which represents 57% of tax revenue spending is, in a sense, making one group of people pay for the existence of another group of people. If this entitlement peer group continues to grow then a well-functioning economy is unsustainable. When entitlements and debt exceed GDP (Gross Domestic Product) then that will be the end of the “late great USA”.
Pick who will inspire you…
Reading the slide deck its easy to see that the folks who consume these sorts of decks believe that “the future has unlimited possibilities”. And, as Jay-Z says, “we pick and choose… [those] who would inspire the world we are going to make for ourselves.”
But what about the other peer group? What about the people who consume 57% of the taxes that other people pay?
There are people everywhere where the temptation of having someone else pay your way is too strong to resist. I encounter these people from time to time. They have little regret or embarrassment for their situation. They would rather spend their time “working the system” to try to get benefits than spend their time positioning themselves to be productive members of society.
The Take
Read the Jay-Z quote again and then page through the slide deck linked below.
Who will you pick to inspire the world that we collectively will make? Are you the “Meekers’s” or a recipient of the 57% of tax revenue?
Mary Meeker 2012 Internet Trends Year-End Update – Business Insider
Read some related postings
The Future of Digital… is not in a rear-view mirror
How do organizations deal with changes in the external environment?
ARRL: Does the ARRL need a Strategic Plan?
NASA: What to do after “Mission Accomplished”
Voice mail, suckers, and those people formerly known as the audience
The NPR “three minute fiction” quoted below is certainly a sign of the times… brought home recently as I and thousands of people watched the reality(?) show Gold Rush Live on “television” (what’s that?) as will as on ustream.
The difference between traditional television and ustream is the participatory nature. That is, Ustream turns what used to be a “broadcast” (one way; one-to-many) into the opportunity for engagement (multi-directional, many-to-many) through usteams real-time “Social Stream”. In parallel with the social steam on Ustream was another engagement opportunity through Twitter and the #GoldRush and #GoldRushLive hash tags. There may have even been a Google Hangout at the time of the show.
I wonder if this re/definition of “television” is just another step along the path of the dissolution of those people “formerly known as the audience” (see link below)
So what? The Generation Gap
“Being social” (perhaps in an ever evolving way) is one of the things that clearly distinguishes the generations. Whereas the social graph of previous generations reached no farther than the distance you could comfortably walk or dive now those boundaries are eliminated.
“Quiet, I’m making a long distance phone call” was something you could hear in an old movie. But now that boundary is shattered. “Where you are” does not matter. Everyone can talk to everyone – no matter where they are.
With the generations, the social graph has changed dramatically. Who you can (potentially) interact with is now unlimited. It’s curious to listen to the generations. To this generation they can’t understand why their parents and grandparents are not on Facebook, twitter, and other social media. While, at the same time, parents and grandparents don’t understand why kids are texting, uploading videos to YouTube, twittering, Instagramming, blogging, and so on.
Will there ever NOT be a generation gap?
What one understands as the typical size of your social graph and the expected velocity of engagement in a diversity of forms is changing at blazing speed compared to the plodding velocities of the past.
What is to become of traditional voice mail? Is that the last place you check before thinking the worst has happened?
From three-minute fiction on NPR – http://www.npr.org/2013/02/23/172638331/voice-mail-is-for-suckers
Dude, yeah. It’s me. Look, what is the deal? Where are you? You haven’t responded to a single email. Everyone is worried, man. We checked your Facebook and you haven’t updated your status in a week. A freaking week. You haven’t even liked anything. And you like everything. Like. Like. Like. You’re kind of obnoxious with the liking, dude. No offense. But nothing. Not even a single Icanhazcheeseburger cat. So then we check your Instagram and again, nothing. No hyper contrast photos of the home brew from last weekend, no warm fuzzy photos of the goat cheese tart you and Beth made, no moody black and whites of the graffiti under the overpass. You haven’t filtered any phone pics for days.
So then we check your Twitter. Not a tweet, not a retweet, no direct messages from you and, dude, not even any mentions. What the hell, man? You can’t stay relevant with a week of tweetless silence. You may as well be dead. So then we check your Tumblr. You haven’t updated that either. It’s been EIGHT days, dude. Time to shut it down. And your last post? What the? What is that about?
Proper punctuation and capitalized letters? Pffft. Whatever. You haven’t responded to any IMs, the invites to Google Hangout, or answered your Skype. So then we check your Flickr. And your SmugMug and your Blogger and your WordPress and your FourSquare. You aren’t checked in, you are checked out. So yesterday, I send you a text. It says it was delivered. But you didn’t
text me back, man. So here we are. Reduced to this. Do you know how low this is, this moment? I’m leaving you a voicemail, dude. What is this, 2004? No, it is not. It’s 2013 and this shiz is horrifying, son. Unacceptable. Do you know how many voicemails I leave in a week?None. Zero. You want to know how many voice mails I get in a week? One. From my mom, dude. From my mom. Voice mail is for suckers, man. And moms. Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but it’s scary. If we don’t hear from you soon, I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll have to, like, come over to your house or something. Knock on your door. That’s weird, man.
Weird. Just the thought of it. Face to face contact. Who does that? Don’t make us do that, man. Log on. Text me. Facebook me. Just don’t call my voice mail, dude. I don’t check that stuff.
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Augmented Reality: Successful dating with “Sight”
It’s February 14th – Valentines Day
So, what if you had “Sight” – an embedded contact lens that provided you an augmented reality and “coaching” (when needed) on a date?
Check out this video from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design graduates Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo, titled “Sight,” credited to an entity named Sight Systems
If we are in an age of “love in the age of algorithms” then what better addition than “Sight” - enabled by technology and our always-on hyper-connected global reality – giving you that extra “edge”.
And if “Sight” doesn’t quite work out for you in a “legitimate way” then perhaps the ending of this short digital film will suggest an alternative, but less acceptable approach, to a successful dating experience.
The Future of Digital… is not in a rear-view mirror
Last night we watched President Obama give the State of the Union address.
But what about the state of Digital? What happened over the past 20 years?
How can you see the future in a rear-view mirror… ?
Check out this great slide deck to see how far Digital media, wireless, and the internet has progressed over the past 20 years. I found it interesting that the title of this deck is “The Future of Digital” yet there is not a single slide in the deck that projects the future in any year past the present.
One of the many lessons of history is that anything truly “interesting” that happens is going to be unexpected, non-linear, dis-contiguous, and disruptive to the status quo. So, a simple extension of any of the historical statistical data provided the slide deck will not capture the future of digital.
“The business of the future is to be dangerous”
How many of us are complacent passengers “along for the ride” with technology and digital media without really being fully aware of how technology and digital are changing us – culture, society, and even the neuroplasticity of the mind. There are a couple of links below to folks that are thinking about the affects of media on us.
Those who are thinking seriously about this owe one to Marshall McLuhan. Back in the 1960′s he recognized the extent of how the medium changes us. To put it succinctly,
“We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us”.
In any case, an excellent “retrospective” more than the future of digital captured as statistical depictions is linked below. From: IGNITION: Future of Digital conference on November 27-28, 2012 in New York.
Related reading
In the vein of Black Swans & “The business of the future is to be dangerous”…
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Will there be books in the future?
Understanding Media: The Extension of Man
ARRL: Does the ARRL need a Strategic Plan?
Strategy in the Corporate World
A few days ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to the UK Daily Mail. In that interview, Zuckerberg talked about Facebook’s greatest challenge and missed opportunities. “Facebook’s biggest challenge – and its greatest opportunity lies in mobile devices which is an area that the company did not pay much attention to until just last year.”
About a week ago I watched a Bloomberg video interview of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. In that interview she talked about the future of Yahoo and the concept of the “interest graph” to compete in search against Google and Facebook
A few months ago Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman appeared at the quarterly earnings call to talk about the HP turnaround. An extensive amount of material was presented detailing the turnaround and how all levels of the company will become aligned to the new strategy.
Everyone has one…
Needless to say, every public company has a strategy. Strategy is driven by the recognition (diagnosis) of challenges and opportunities. The nature of the challenges and opportunities sets the stage to formulate an approach to best address the situation. The approach translates into the development and execution of a coordinated set of actions across the enterprise along with metrics and measure to assess progress. You can see this clearly played out in HP’s multi-year turnaround strategy made public at the recent quarterly earnings call.
In general, you can look in just about any quarterly report or annual report of a public company and find the strategy. They differ in degree consistent with the diagnosis of the extent of the perceived challenge and opportunity in the external and competitive environment in which they operate.
Strategy in government agencies and charities
So why is it that NASA and the ARRL have such difficulty when it comes to formulating a strategy?
NASA
In late 2011, the Congress directed the NASA Office of Inspector General to commission a “comprehensive independent assessment of NASA’s strategic direction and agency management.”
In part, this is what it said:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is at a transitional point in its history and is facing a set of circumstances that it has not faced in combination before…
Other than the long-range goal of sending humans to Mars, there is no strong, compelling national vision for the human spaceflight program, which is arguably the centerpiece of NASA’s spectrum of mission areas…
Although gaps in U.S. human spaceflight capability have existed in the past, several other factors, in combination, make this a unique period for NASA. These include a lack of consensus on the next steps in the development of human spaceflight, increasing financial pressures, an aging infrastructure, and the emergence of additional space-capable nations—some friendly, some potentially unfriendly…
These problems are not primarily of NASA’s doing, but the agency could craft a better response to the uncertainty, for example, by developing a strategic plan that includes clear priorities and a transparent budget allocation process. A better response would improve NASA’s ability to navigate future obstacles and uncertainties. An effective agency response is vital, because at a time when the strategic importance of space is rising and the capabilities of other spacefaring nations are increasing, U.S. leadership is faltering…
The ARRL (American Radio Relay League)
The ARRL as an organization is nearly 100 years old. Below is their self-diagnosed position on a strategic plan
Posted on the ARRL web site regarding CEO David Summers K1ZZ findings (emphasis mine)
Mr. Sumner reported on his research into “state of the art” strategic planning by large membership associations. Perhaps because of the negative impact of the financial upheavals of 2008 and the revolution in electronic publishing, at this time there appears to be no consensus among associations as to the value of strategic planning or the best way for associations to go about it. The ARRL Board last updated the organization’s strategic plan in 2009 and normally would conduct an in-depth review three to five years later. The committee discussed the perceived shortcomings of past strategic planning efforts along with possible improvements. Without taking a formal decision the committee concluded that while strategic planning remains important to the ARRL, planning for a successful Centennial celebration in 2014 is the current priority. A fresh approach to strategic planning should be taken immediately afterward.
Challenge and Opportunity
What NASA and the ARRL have in common when it comes to the difficulty in strategic planning revolves around the assessment of challenge and opportunity. This has many dimensions. Partial considerations are suggested below.
In a sense, for NASA, it’s a case of “mission accomplished”. It’s fair to say that NASA’s biggest challenge and accomplishment was putting a man on the moon and bringing him safely back to earth. This was the challenge that President Kennedy set for NASA on May 25, 1961. NASA accomplished this goal in July 1969 with Apollo 11. NASA repeated this accomplishment five more times with Apollo 12,14,15, and 17.
NASA Mission accomplished - six times over. Now what?
For the ARRL, in a sense, just as in the case of NASA, for the ARRL it’s also “mission accomplished”. I will have to rely on Richard Bartlett’s assessment in his book The World of Ham Radio, 1901-1950: a social history.
In the epilogue of the book, published in 2007, Bartlett provides an answer for those who would ask him the obvious question: If you published the book in 2007 then why end the history of amateur radio and the history of the ARRL in 1950? What happened in Amateur Radio and the ARRL over the past 57 years which is not accounted for in the book?
Why end this book as of the year 1950? It is because the story of ham radio’s development essentially takes place in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Having been created, accepted, regulated, and achieved permanent status by 1950, the story after that becomes one primarily of repetition. The one great exception is in the area of technology, and save for minimal descriptions necessary to the story, that has not been our concern.
ARRL Mission accomplished – back in 1950. Now what?
NASA and the ARRL – Sources of identity
NASA and the ARRL have something else in common of a deeper nature.
The identities and goals of both organizations was set externally.
The Congress and the President of the United States created the national Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. Amateur Radio was first governed by the U.S. Department of Commerce (the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor until March 1913), then by the Federal Radio Commission, and finally (in 1934) by the FCC.
The broad missions of each organization was set by other agencies
For NASA, the preamble to the act of congress was, “An Act to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and for other purposes.” For Amateur Radio, the definition of the Amateur Radio Service was set in Part 97 Amateur Radio Service Subpart A–General Provisions §97.1 Basis and purpose.
If an organization gets its identity and goals outside of itself, then how much latitude does the organization have (or, think it has) when it senses that its basic purpose or goals need to evolve to stay relevant as the external environment changes?
Engineering and operations, not Strategy
The third aspect that the ARRL and NASA have in common is based on the combination of the two commonalities mentioned above.
Insofar as the identity of each organization was set externally outside the organization. And, insofar as the goals of the organization were set externally outside the organization both organizations developed a culture of, what could be called, engineering and operations. There was no need for either organization to develop the capability to re/define identify and or re/establish strategic goals. The operating model of such an organization has a focus of delivering preestablished goals and sustaining ongoing operations.
In the corporate world this is never the case. Corporations are constantly challenged to re/define their identity and re/position in the context of the ever-changing environment of challenges, opportunity, and competition. The job of assessing and diagnosing the environment, framing an approach, and then aligning execution and resources is the job of the Chief Executive with oversight from the Board of Directors. So, it’s no wonder that analysts, on a quarterly basis, will badger Zuckerberg, Mayer, Whitman, and every other CEO of a public company into articulating their latest strategy.
The Take
What are the legitimate reasons for any organization to not have a strategic plan?
Well, probably the most obvious reason based on what is written above is that an organization without a strategic plan does not recognize any challenge or opportunity in the context in which it operates.
If there is no new challenge and no new opportunity and you are satisfied with the organizations current performance then there is no need of any strategic plan. One simply operates in a state of sustainability by repetition - for as long as you can maintain it within a budget, or for as long as you continue to not recognize a challenge or opportunity in the external environment, or for as long as you can get away with it until stakeholders commission a “comprehensive assessment” (as in the case of Congress and NASA above) to find out why you don’t have a compelling vision of the future that can engage a national interest.
The last page on the last chapter of Richard Bartlett’s book ends with this:
Time passes on, and the old guard gives way to the newcomers. In November 1948 death came to Kenneth Bryant Warner, who for nearly thirty years was secretary and general manager of the ARRL. “It was Maxim who conceived our League, it as Warner who breathed into it life and energy and vitality, whose balanced judgement and clear vision ensured its growth and success,” reads his obituary. “With his passing we suffer the loss of a great leader, an untiring servant in the cause of amateur radio. p. 230 The World of Ham Radio 1901-1950
The way Bartlett ends his book begs the question as to why he thinks Amateur Radio and the ARRL entered a state of 57 years of unremarkable repetition. Was it because every ounce of value was developed from Amateur Radio’s pre-defined identity and purpose? Or, was it because in 1948 Amateur Radio and the ARRL ran out of great leaders like Bryant who “breathed into it life and energy and vitality… [ that] ensured its growth and success.” .
Bartlett does not give an answer – one way or the other.
Related Reading
NASA: What to do after Mission Accomplished
ARRL: Reaping the Whirlwind
The Boy Scouts recently celebrated its centennial
Read the intro to the Strategic Plan from Chief Executive Robert J. Mazzuca
As our first century of Scouting comes to a close, I am delighted to share with you our 2011–2015 National Council Strategic Plan. This document represents the confluence of our vital mission with a clear corporate direction and will be the cornerstone for our second century of Scouting. I am particularly proud of the grassroots support and feedback given by Scouters throughout the country that provided guidance as we developed objectives and goals that are in direct support of local councils. This investment made in setting our course may well be one of the most significant accomplishments in the history of our movement.
The National Council is committed to following this strategic direction with a very formal process; allocating manpower and financial resources appropriately, and setting course corrections as the environment dictates.
The stakes are simply too high to put forth anything but our best effort
And then read the 2011-2015 Strategic Plan
It’s amazing how many opportunities CEO’s get to differentiate themselves.
