Planning

My degree was in Environmental Engineering, but I'm currently doing Strategic/Technology Planning. So what exactly is Planning?

Planning can be viewed as an exercise to optimize resources. We do it subconsciously every day. For example if you need to go grocery shopping, get fuel for the car and settle your bills at the post office, you will plan your route and take into account waiting time (if any), if you need to grab lunch in between, are the places close by and so on and so forth. Once you have that plan in your head, you implement it for the day or even spread the activities over a few days depending on how your schedule is.

In terms of Corporate Planning, there are two types. Strategic Planning and Business Planning. In simple terms, strategic planning is sort of planning for the future (say over 10-15 years) and business planning is more towards short term activities. So for example, you want to be worth RM 500 million within 10 years and RM 1 billion by the time you're 50 (strategic planning) so what you do is you invest in property, mutual funds etc (business planning). But to plan, you need your background information, so this is where the analysis tools come in. Some that might be familiar to you is STEEP, SWOT and Porter's 5 Forces.

On paper, it looks easy enough to do either strategic or business planning, but in reality it is not that easy since you need to do enough benchmarking activities to understand your competitor's own strategic plans so that in some ways, you'll be able to leapfrog their achievements. This is where radical thinking comes in.

How exactly do we think radically? If you've taken chemistry before, you'll know that a radical is an element that disassociated itself from other elements. For example let's take oxygen - O2. If the two Os disassociates, you'll get two O radicals. That is actually how you form ozone. When the O radical meets O2, you'll get ozone, 03.

Aaaaanyways, if you take that as an example, you can rightfully conclude that to think radically, you need to disassociate yourself from the norm.

Hmmm....what is the point of this post? I pun tak tau. Just writing my thoughts, I guess. Sorry if I have bore you...heh