Strategic Planning Analogy #525: Budget Madness

THE STORY
Well, here we are in the middle of March Madness, when Americans go nuts over college basketball. Millions of people choose who they think is going to win all the games. Warren Buffet is giving out a billion dollars to anyone who chooses the correct outcome for every game in the NCAA basketball tournament.

The Wall Street Journal has come up with their own version of how to pick the teams. They put together a site where the names of the colleges are eliminated. All you have to look at are statistics. Over the years, they have found that people are more accurate at choosing winners if they are not biased by seeing the team name before making their choice.

They call it the “blind” bracket. I guess sometimes we see better when we are blind.

THE ANALOGY
We all have built-in biases. These biases affect our objectivity. Eliminate the bias and we make better choices. This is true in picking the winning college basketball team. I believe it would also be true in business budgets.

Most companies have horribly uncreative budget processes. They consist of little more than just taking last year’s numbers and tweaking them a little (sales go up a little and costs go down a little). And even with that, the budget targets are often missed.

I think the problem has to do with too much familiarity with the company divisions. This creates biases anchored around the status quo (what we know). I believe we would get better budgets if we could do it more blindly (like the Wall Street Journal Blind Brackets).

Why do I say this? Look at how most companies do M&A work. The M&A folks tend to know less about who they acquiring than what their company knows about their own divisions. Yet the M&A people tend to do a much better job of thinking through their forward forecasts than the budget folk.

The M&A crew tends to look as much as 10 years out and do sophisticated discounted cash flow (DCF) analyses. They try multiple scenarios, with different levels of investment and synergies. They look at ways to change the business model in order to justify the acquisition premium.

All this for an outside company they are somewhat blind to. Yet, for our own divisions, which we should know far more intimately, we take a far less sophisticated approach—just look out a year or so and do a small tweak on what was done last year. Something here just doesn’t seem right.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that budgeting processes won’t dramatically improve unless we find ways to reduce the bias towards the status quo. There is no reason to believe that the status quo optimizes the current portfolio. We don’t expect the status quo for acquisitions. Why should we expect any less for our divisions?

Short Time Frame

The problem with a one year budget time frame is that one year is usually too short to complete a radical transformation of a division. In a radical transformation, the first year typically has added investments and a disruption of sales. As a result, if you are only looking one year out, the budget for a radical transformation scenario looks awful.

What executive wants to accept a budget where sales go down and costs go up? They know that the status quo looks a lot better than that, so they opt for a minor tweak of incremental improvement rather than the first stage of a radical transformation into a far better future.

That’s why companies like Kodak couldn’t make the radical transformation to digital imaging. The bias towards the status quo looks so much better only one year out. Unfortunately, as you string together a series of these “one year out” budgets, you never get around to making the transformation. It keeps getting tabled for an unknown future date until it is too late.

I’ll bet that if Kodak had not already been in the photography business, and had their M&A team examine the business (more blindly), they would have come back with an aggressive transformation to digital imaging as a condition to purchase.  

Go Blind

Is there anything we can do to reduce the bias and budget our divisions more blindly? Sure, perhaps we could make the budgeting team act more like an M&A team that looks at outside businesses more objectively on a longer DCF basis. Or maybe you could disguise a few of your divisions (without the division name) and give it to the M&A team to look at as an acquisition and see what they come up with.

I know that many investment bankers (and activist investors) look at companies from the outside (somewhat blindly) and make proposals about how a company can do something radically different with their assets. I’m not saying they are always right, but at least it can stimulate some non-status quo thinking.

Right now, a lot of these suggestions come unsolicited. What if you proactively sought out more of these less-biased points of view from trusted outsiders?

Even something as simple as benchmarking and best practice analyses could provide a new perspective on what to do differently. These potential budget-line inputs are not biased by what YOU do, but by what best-in-class do. And it could be something radically different.

The Importance of Pursuit

Over the years, I have continually stressed the threefold strategy requirements of:

1.     Positioning (A place where you can win)

2.     Pursuit (Having the Competencies and Capabilities needed to win)

3.     Productivity (A business model that can earns an optimal profit off the winning position)

In the typical one-year budget cycle, it is usually assumed that the positioning stays about the same and the focus turns towards getting more productivity out of the status quo model. The issues of pursuit are rarely discussed.

But pursuit is a critical component to success. If you want to grow, you need to build the capacity to effectively handle that growth. This includes the size of your sales force, the limits on your current supply chain, the capacity of your IT systems, and so on. If you don’t plan in radical changes to capacity, then you won’t effectively be able to capture that growth.

You also need to build in radical improvements to competencies. The world is changing. Today’s status quo is tomorrow’s obsolescence. Are you staying on top of what you need to know to win in the future? How’s your R&D spending? How about educational programs? Are you pro-actively bringing in new talent with the new knowledge you will need?

We can often miss these pursuit issues in a typical budgeting process because of that bias towards the status quo. It makes us falsely believe that we already have the capacity required and competencies needed. After all, we are only tweaking the status quo for the next year.

As a result, the needed step-wise leaps in capacity and competencies never get into the budget. Eventually, that chokes the division’s ability to do what is needed. Then, even the status quo no longer works any more.

I dare say that if we were looking at are divisions more blindly, as we would an acquisition, we would do a better job of factoring these types of investments into our analysis.

SUMMARY
Biases tend to cloud our judgment and make us less objective. This is particularly true when it comes to annual budgets. The bias towards the status quo keeps us from seeing a more radical—and much brighter—future. By changing up the typical budgeting process and adding blinder, more objective eyes, we can find these radical transformations and incorporate into the budgets the radical “pursuit” changes needed to make them a reality.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Most vision statements talk in some way about being leaders or best-in-class. Achieving exceptional results like that don’t come from perpetuating the mediocre status quo past. So why accept a budgeting process which encourages perpetuating the mediocre status quo past?

Strategic Planning Analogy #507: Hammers Are Lousy As Saws

THE STORY

Joe the carpenter wanted to be as efficient as possible, so he decided to only carry around only one tool—a hammer.

Joe had three tasks that day: hammer some nails, screw some screws and cut some boards. Joe decided to do all three tasks with his hammer. Hammering the nails went quite well with the use of the hammer.

Getting the screws into the wood with the hammer, however, was far more difficult. By the time Joe could bang the screw into the wood with the hammer, the screw was all bent, the wood was a bit shattered, and the screw was doing a lousy job of holding the wood together.

Finally, Joe discovered that if you whack at a board long enough with a hammer, you can break it into two pieces. But when compared to cutting a board with a saw, whacking it with a hammer was less accurate in getting the cut in the right place, and the edges where it was “cut” with the hammer were all distorted and ragged. This made the board less useful than if a saw had been used.

But in spite of all the problems with the results, Joe the carpenter was still proud of his work. After all, as Joe put it, “I simplified my work by having to carry only one tool.”

THE ANALOGY

Joe’s approach to his work was rather misguided. What good does it do to simplify the number of tools you carry if the end results are awful? Replacing the screwdriver and saw with a hammer lead to a rather useless outcome. Not only would the results have been better if Joe had used a different tool for each task, it would have taken less time and been easier.

Business leaders wouldn’t be as misguided at Joe, would they? In one way, I think many are. There is this tool that businesses use, called a “budget.” The budget is a good business tool, just as a hammer is a good carpentry tool. But just as a hammer cannot effectively do all the work of carpentry, a budget cannot effectively do all the work of business.

Three of the key tasks of business management are to:

1. Effectively manage the treasury function;
2. Make sure the business operating divisions are doing the right things; and
3. Provide incentives for employees to act in the best interests of the company.

Many companies rely primarily on the budget process to do all three tasks. But as we will see in this blog, that is like using a hammer to tighten screws and cut boards. The budget is an effective tool to help the treasury function, just as the hammer is effective in hammering nails. But for the other two tasks, there are better tools than budgets. By trying to use a single budgeting process to do all three, one ends up with a mess. There are better tools for monitoring the operating functions and providing employee incentives, and they should be used instead of the “hammer” of budgets.

THE PRINCIPLE

The principle here is that companies are not doing themselves any favors by using budgets as a tool where it doesn’t belong. It is great for the treasury function, but inappropriate for many of the additional places where it is used.

1. The Budget “Hammer” Works Well on the Treasury “Nail”

The key function of treasury is to ensure that the cash of the business is properly managed. It looks for efficient (and cost effective) sources of cash when internal cash flows fall short of need and looks for efficient uses of excess cash produced internally. Timing of these actions is very important, so that the proper level of funding is available to match the fluctuating cash flow needs.

The budgeting process is a rather good tool to help in this treasury function. It provides a broad overview of cash flows over time. This helps the treasury function plan in advance so that the right amount of money is in the right place at the right time at the best price. The budget is also a good tool to share with the debt and equity community, so that they will cooperate more favorably with your cash needs. It helps build trust, so that they will provide cash at a favorable rate. Treasury should be the primary goal of the budget.

2. The Budget “Hammer” is a Poor Choice for the Employee Incentive “Screw”

However, when budgets are also used as the primary tool to incentivize employees, it destroys the integrity of the budget. Employees will try to “game the budget system” in order to insure easier and higher bonuses. This creates a budget which no longer reflects best estimate of cash flows, because the numbers are padded to improve the likelihood of a bonus. As a result, it damages not only the ability of the budget to get employees to work harder but it damages the ability of the budget to accurately help the treasury plan accurate cash flow estimates.

In addition, employees understand that there is usually more than one way to hit a budget number—and not all of these ways are equally good for the long term health of the business. For example, this quarter’s budgeted profit number can be hit by doing lots of actions harmful to long term prosperity, like improperly cutting investment in the future, cutting research, cutting maintenance, cutting quality, cutting service, overcharging customers, and so on. Since both good and bad behaviors can be used to hit a budget number, the budget is not very effective as an incentive for ensuring right behavior. It is like trying to secure a screw by banging at it with a hammer.

3. The Budget “Hammer” is a Poor Choice for the Operational “Board”

Similarly, the budget is a poor choice as the primary means of determining the specific actions of the operating divisions. The main problem is that budgets are frozen well in advance, before the year begins. As we all know, the marketplace is a dynamic, rapidly changing environment. It is impossible to fully anticipate all of these potential changes. It makes no sense to tie up your operations into budgeting straightjackets, unable to adjust to the changing business environment just because the best guess estimate put into the budget nearly a year earlier has proven to be off.

Does it make sense to not exploit a great opportunity merely because that opportunity was not in the budget? That would be like a miner refusing to take advantage of a huge find of gold in the mountain because they only budgeted to take a meager amount of silver out of the mountain. And the opposite is also true…why continue a particular action merely because it is in the budget if the changing situation makes that action no longer viable?

Budgets are typically broad-based numeric documents. They are not good at understanding strategic nuances, competitive dynamics or the actions behind the numbers.  To expect that out of budgets is like expecting a hammer to effectively cut a board.

Recommendations

To get around these problems, I suggest the following:

a) Get A Screwdriver. Get a tool specifically designed for incenting employees. To insure people are incented to do the right things, specifically outline what right things those are and reward achieving behaviors instead of numbers. For example, if you want an employee to master a skill, make skill mastery the criterion for bonus. Or if you want an employee to successfully roll out a new product or enter the Brazilian market or reduce the time to convert a plant to a new production run, then spell it out IN WORDS (specific enough to be difficult to game).  In the old days, we called that Management by Objectives which then morphed into Balanced Scorecards and now Key Performance Indicators (KPI). I think the migration may be going in the wrong direction towards fewer behavior-based words and more game-able numbers, but at least it is better than bonuses based almost exclusively on budgets. In fact, I might suggest doing the “screwdriver” in the spring and the “hammer” in the fall in order to keep budgets from creeping too deeply into the incentive process.

b) Get A Saw. Get a tool specifically designed for directing operations on what is an acceptable approach to their sphere of influence. This tool would tend to set up measures using a more strategic language. It would explain the strategic role that operational unit has within the organization. It would explain what “winning” would look like for that group. It would explain what the proper trade-offs are on attributes and outcomes. It would point the direction in which the operations are to migrate to in order to reach future strategic goals. Then the company delegates the specifics, to free up the operating unit to bob and weave with the changing environment in order to exploit the moment, provided the actions remain within the strategic boundaries.

c) Improve the Hammer. Budgets can be more dynamic. Draw up some contingency budgets in advance (based on different scenarios) so that you are ready if situations drastically change. Consider rolling budgets that adjust quarterly or semi-annually (depending on your business). Note: this becomes easier to do when the budget is freed by no longer having to also work as a screwdriver and saw. Also, consider doing the screwdriver and saw work PRIOR to finalizing the budget. That way, the budget more accurately reflects what will actually be done, instead of being just a wish list. Remember, the budget shows financial outcomes which are determined by action inputs. So get the inputs figured out before declaring the outcomes.

This is not to say that budgets are totally ignored outside of treasury. The budget provides discipline for the more routine aspects of business. The budget can help to determine if the desired strategy is achievable under current cash constraints. And if the budget has no connection to actions, it ceases to accurately reflect what the future cash situation will really be. So a little bit of the strategy needs to permeate the other areas. But it shouldn’t be the primary driver.

SUMMARY

Budgets are very useful, but they should not be the master tool to drive all of your management concerns. Budgets are most effective when centered primarily on the needs of the treasury function. A second, more action-related tool would be used to incent employees and a third, more strategic tool would be used to manage operational units.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. Having a single tool may appear efficient, but it may be so ineffective that it destroys your ability to properly run your business.

Strategic Planning Analogy #491: Seeking Choices

THE STORY

When my children were little, they often weren't pleased by what was served at home for dinner. They would complain and ask if they could have something different to eat.

I would explain to them that we weren't running a restaurant. I did not have an extensive menu of options for them to choose from. Each dinner had only one meal on the menu. The only choice they had was to either eat it or go hungry.

It did not make my children happy when I eliminated their eating options.

THE ANALOGY

It’s not much fun looking over a dinner menu if there is only one item on the menu. The lack of options and choices makes the task seem a bit futile. Since you’re going to get the one item on the menu anyway, you may as well skip looking at the menu.

A similar situation can occur with strategic planning. A lot of business people resist going through the planning process, saying they do not enjoy it. In many cases, I think the reason for resisting a strategic planning process is similar to the reason for resisting a menu with only one option on it—a perceived lack of choices.

If you think you are going to be basically doing the same things after the planning process as you were doing before the process (because of a perception of no other alternatives), then why do the process? You can skip it and go back to doing the one thing you knew you were going to do anyway. Under these assumptions, the strategic planning process can be seen as a waste of time, keeping you from getting your one task done (just as looking at a one-item menu wastes time and keeps you from getting to eat the one meal you know you are going to have).

This really hit home with me as I looked at the way business people from different countries treated the concept of strategic planning on social media sites like Linkedin. In fully developed mature economies, pure strategic planning jobs were disappearing and the discipline was not held in high esteem. By contrast, in emerging economies people actually seemed excited about strategic planning and there appeared to be a greater abundance of professional strategic planning positions being created.

Then I started to make the connection that much of the excitement around strategic planning in developing economies was due to a perception that businesses had many more options. As a result, it was important to spend time in these countries doing strategic planning in order to choose which options to focus on. It was as if they saw strategic planning as the way to choose the best items on a lengthy menu of tasty options.

By contrast, those in mature economies or industries seemed to see fewer options available to them.  It was as if the rules had already been written and hardened in concrete.  You couldn’t change anything—choices had already been made.  Your only option was to work harder at the same old thing.  Therefore strategic planning was a waste of time—a one-item menu that could be skipped.

Of course, a skilled strategic planner can see the value of strategic planning in virtually any environment—even mature ones.  But if their audience does not perceive the value, the planning process will be resisted (or even eliminated).  Therefore, strategic planners need to address this issue of perceived choices.

THE PRINCIPLE

The principle here is that great strategic planning processes deal with determining which strategic choices to make.  Choice is the essence of what strategy should focus on.  In his famous Harvard Business Review article “What is Strategy?” (from November-December 1996), Michael Porter said “Competitive strategy is about being different.  It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of values.”

In the 2011 book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt says that the main difference between good strategies and bad strategies is that good strategies are based on making tough choices and bad strategies refuse to make choices.  Or, in Rumelt’s words “Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goal in favor of others.  When this hard work is not done, weak amorphous strategy is the result.”

In a prior blog, I also talked about how the lack of making choices can lead to disaster.

The problem is that many modern strategic planning processes are missing this key point.  They are focusing on something other than making the hard choices and trade-offs necessary for creating a winning position with a complementary winning business model.

It’s gotten so bad that even many of those in the strategic planning field no longer see their primary task as one of helping companies make tough choices and coordinated trade-offs.  Without someone advocating the need to make tough choices in a strategic manner, the tough choices won’t be made.  Worse yet, business leaders are increasingly buying into the idea that there is no need to make tough strategic choices.  And once they start believing in that, it isn’t much of a leap for these executives to questioning why strategic planning should be done at all.  After all, what is the benefit of staring at a one-item menu?

Common Substitutes for Choice-Making

There are many processes out there which call themselves strategic planning, but really are not, because they do not focus on making choices.  Here is a brief description of some of them:

1. Elaborate Budgeting:  Here, the end outcome is not a set of coordinated choices and trade-offs, but a set of numerical spreadsheets.  In essence, it is just a budget with perhaps a couple more years of length to it and a few more words attached to it.  The tough choices needed to make the budget a reality tend to be missing.  It’s just a bunch of numbers one “hopes” to achieve. This often occurs when the planning process is housed in the finance department and run by the same people who create the budgets or do financial analyses.  In the past, I have used the basketball analogy and said this insufficient process is like focusing on yelling at the scoreboard rather than focusing on the hard choices of what play to draw up on the clipboard.  Yes, the highest score wins, but you don’t get the highest score by just staring at the scoreboard (the numbers).  I've spoken more about this here, here, here, and here.

2. Platitudes and Lofty Aspirations:  In this version, the focus is on lofty goals and aspirations which end up sounding like hollow platitudes. The end outcome is not a set of choices, but a nice phrase that can be put on a banner and hung in the lobby. They say things like “we aim to be a world class this or that” or “delight customers” or “create superior shareholder value” or something similar.  These are nice things to achieve, but unless you make hard choices about how to be different, or how your business model’s trade-offs achieve these things profitably, they are only wishes.  Wishes won’t come true just because you want them to.  They are the outcomes of tough choices. I’ve spoken more about this here and here.

3. More Better:  Here, the goal is to just do the same old thing as before, only more of it and better than before.  The end outcome is list of things to do which improve upon the status quo.  The problem is that this assumes the status quo is the right set of choices. It often isn't  because environments change, making the status quo obsolete. Second, when you try to improve everything, you often improve nothing, because you did not make any trade-offs needed to truly excel in any area.  Instead, the efforts cancel each other out.  The third problem is that this process tends to try to outrun the competition with a similar position, rather than trying to find a point of differentiation.  In other words, this version rushes directly to what to “do” without first stopping to decide (choose) what you need to “be.”  I've spoken more about this here, here and here.

How Do We Overcome This?

So how do we overcome all of these poor excuses for planning and get back to solid strategic planning which focuses on making the right choices?  There are two areas to work on. 

First, we need to offer strategic planning processes where choices are the focal point.  This needs to replace lesser processes which are often little more than budgets, platitudes or attempts to be more better.  We need processes focused on questions like:

1. Where are we going to win? (Customers, Markets, Solutions, Points of Differentiation)
2. Why are we going to win? (What bundle of trade-offs will give us the competitive edge in owning the winning position? What business model will beat out the alternatives?)
3. What do we need to focus on to pull this off (capabilities, capacities, competencies)?
4. What should we NOT focus on? (because it will keep us from winning)
5. How do we tweak the business model so that we not only win, but make money?

Second, we need to get management excited about the importance of making these types of choices.  There are many reasons why management may not see the importance of making choices.  First, they may not believe they have many choices.  This is usually a false notion.  Restructurings, repositionings and new business models come about all the time.  Just look at how businesses and industries are continually being replaced by something new.  Why not become the next new thing which replaces the status quo?

Or perhaps management feels that the status quo is just fine, so there is no need to change it (no additional choices needed). But we all know that the environment changes and that all strategies eventually become obsolete. Isn't it better to be the agent of change and grab all the market share which comes with being the next big thing rather than to be the victim of someone else’s change and become obsolete?  Making better choices will create a stronger, more prosperous company and who wouldn't want that?

In other words, first we need to build processes which create robust lists of options and a way to choose the best option (like the Maitre D who helps restaurant patrons make a great choice from a great menu). Second, we need to get management to want to make the tough choices (desire to go to the restaurant and choose something new to eat off that menu).

SUMMARY

The key function of strategy is to help companies make the tough choices and trade-offs which will place them in differentiated positions where they can win.  Unfortunately, lesser processes which focus only on budgets, platitudes or tactical improvements have crept in to replace the key function of choice. To get companies back on track, strategists need to do two things: 1) Bring back processes which focus on choice; and 2) get management interested in making those tough choices.

FINAL THOUGHTS

To get patrons to try new choices on the menu, some restaurants offer free samples. Perhaps you need to get your management interested in making choices by giving them samples of what particular choices could mean for the company. 

Which Comes First—Goals or Strategies? (Part 2)

REVIEW
In the last blog, we looked at why it can be a mistake to set financial goals prior to setting the action strategy. More specifically, we saw that setting financial goals prior to setting a strategy can increase the risk of:

1) Setting the Wrong Goal (wrong metric and/or wrong level)
2) Taking the Wrong Actions (if the goal is inappropriate than it will lead to doing inappropriate actions)
3) Increasing Undesirable Risks (Unrealistic goals can lead to desperate behaviors)
4) Sacrificing the Long-term to hit Short-term Goals (Sub-optimal Trade-offs)
5) Perpetuating Failed Strategies (Rather than shutting them down)

In this blog, we will look at suggestions for reducing these risks.

CLARIFICATION
Before moving on, I’d like to make a clarification. Thanks to some feedback, I realize that I may have given the false impression that I am against having goals. On the contrary, I like goals. I’m reminded of an old Pogo cartoon. Pogo and his buddy Albert are running through the woods as fast as they can. Pogo asks his buddy Albert if there is any particular destination they are running towards. Albert says no. So Pogo replies, “Then why are we running so fast?”

The idea is that if you have no idea of where you are going, there is no reason to run. Strategy is like that. Strategic planning is the task of finding the best path to a goal/mission/objective. If you do not know where you want to go, you cannot design a path to get there.

My concern is that most of the goals I see are merely financial numbers, like a goal for sales, profits, etc. These are not destinations, they are hoped for outcomes. They provide little to no insight into what the company must become to be successful.

These financial “destination-less” goals are the ones which lead to the five problems listed above (if they are set prior to setting the strategy). In this blog, we will look at alternatives.

THE PRINCIPLE
Here are four suggestions for how to avoid these problems.

Suggestion #1: Set Non-Financial Goals
There is no law that says all goals need to be a financial number. Successful financials do not magically appear out of nowhere. No, they are typically an outcome of a combination of the following actions:

a) Owning the right position in the marketplace.
b) Maintaining/Strengthening the core competencies, capabilities and capacities needed to hold/strengthen a winning position.
c) Leveraging a winning position in the marketplace.
d) Having enough productivity in order to profitably afford to the position.

If good numbers depend on first achieving these types of actions, why not set up goals around these types of issues? For example, you could have a goal of achieving a particular position in the mind of the targeted customer. You can measure this goal via consumer research. Or, if your strategy is centered around quality, you can set a quality level goal (which can also be measured). If success requires international expansion, then set that as a measurable goal.

The point here is that there are a lot of ways to achieve a financial target. These approaches may or may not have any correlation to the desired strategic actions listed above. In fact, some of those approaches can disastrous to a strategy.

For example, I know an executive who hit his financial target by completely ignoring the strategic mandate to invest in a repositioning of his business. Instead of taking cash flow and putting it into repositioning, he let the money fall to the bottom line as near-term profits. He made a great bonus that year because he hit the financial target. Soon thereafter, however, the business was sold at a great loss, because the strategic repositioning never occurred. The business was destroyed, because the leader took the wrong path to achieve the near-term financial goal.

The point is that if you want that repositioning to occur, then make the repositioning the goal, not a financial number that can be achieved while ignoring the strategy. In other words, if you want certain strategic behaviors or conditions to occur, than make these behaviors and conditions the goal. The only way to ensure that the right actions get done is to set the goal around the action. Reward doing the right thing rather than hitting a financial goal the wrong way.

And, of course, you cannot set these types of behavior or condition goals until you have an understanding of the proper strategy. That is why strategy work needs to be done before setting the goal.

Suggestion #2: Separate Planning Cycle From the Budget Cycle
Many companies intermingle the timing of the planning cycle with the budgeting cycle. I think this is usually a mistake.

Budgets tend to be very financial in their focus and goal orientation. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. But by formulating strategy at the same time as budgets are set, one tends to end up with strategies which are often little more than a budget with a slightly longer time frame (a sort of 3-year budget). And this can be a bad thing, leading to all the problems mentioned earlier.

If you want people to think more strategically and create more strategic (less financial) long-term goals, it seems to work better if that process is not done simultaneously with annual budgeting. For example, if you do your budgeting in the fall, then do your primary strategy formulation in the spring. Not only does the separation allow for a better focus on strategy, it provides time between the two processes to understand the true ramifications of the strategy, so that strategy can better drive what is an appropriate budget.

Some of the intermingling is a result of placing strategic planning groups inside of finance or budgeting departments. Finance departments have a natural financial orientation, which can lead to goals that are too financial. If you want to reduce that bias, then you might want to consider taking strategic planning out of the finance group (if that is where it is today).

Suggestion #3: Just Don’t Do It
If setting a financial goal up front gets in the way of making great strategy later, then stop setting a financial goal first. It could be just that simple.

Suggestion #4: Add A Feedback Loop
If your company still insists on looking at financial goals first, then reply by insisting that the company also looks at these goals last. In other words, add a feedback loop to the end of the process to determine whether the original goal is still the most appropriate goal. If it isn’t, then reserve the right to change the goal at the end.

It may be that, after the strategic analysis, you conclude that some of your original assumptions during the goal-setting phase are no longer valid. Perhaps the best strategic path leads in a different direction from where your goal lies. If so, change the goal so that it fits your new reality.

SUMMARY
Many companies use a strategic process where financial goals are set before the strategy is chosen. This approach increases the likelihood of bad results and missed opportunities. Four suggestions for reducing this problem are to:

a) Set Non-Financial Goals
b) Separate Planning Cycle From Budgeting Cycle.
c) Stop Setting Goals First
d) Add A Feedback Loop

FINAL THOUGHTS
Before running off to operate your business, be like Pogo and ask what the destination is. And don’t settle for a mere financial number. Ask for a real destination that is based on prior strategic analysis and rooted in specific activities.