I was in New York the other day riding down to Wall Street in a cab. A priest stopped the cab driver and said, "Son, which way to 15th Street?" The cabbie very carefully explained where it was. He stopped the cab and let the priest cross in front of him. After the priest got by, he looked at me with a big grin and said, "He knows the way to heaven, but not to 15th Street!" In our planning we have to know the short range as well as the long range.
In thinking about planning it seems to me that there are three requirements for successful planning: simplicity, flexibility and objectivity.
The first is to keep your plan very simple. A friend of mine who is a professor decided that he had gotten behind on his general reading. So what did he do? He went out and bought himself a big bunch of books that he could read. He bought himself one of those fancy circular bookcases, an easy chair, ottoman, reading lamp, eye shade, smoking jacket and comfortable pair of slippers. Brother, he was ready! He was a planning genius.
Well, the first night he came home from the campus he took his coat off, put on his jacket, lit his pipe, put on his slippers, sat down in that big chair, propped his feet up on the ottoman, turned on the lamp, put on his eye shade, picked out a book and immediately fell asleep.
I said to myself, "How many times have I done the same thing ---- worn myself out in doing the planning and then failed to execute?"
A lot of times you have someone who comes in and tells you what he is going to do. Many times I don't let him tell me, because he is going to lose the steam for getting the job done just in telling me. He has already had the thrill of telling me and therefore he won't go out and do it. So, I just say, "Just surprise me. Tell me about it after you have done it." Why? Because planning, if it gets too complicated, gets to be an end in itself and not a means to something else.
Complexity is often an ego problem. Let me give you an example of that. I have seen superintendents in a plant who work out in the plant with the people, close to the work. Everything is going well, as it should. For some reason he decides that he ought to move up to the front office where he can be with the officers. He moves, fixes up the office with a rug and drapes. Now, a fellow who has his office all fixed up like that just has to have visitors. You just don't fix up an office like that and not have people come in. He joins a club to meet people to invite to his office. So he spends a little time at the club, meets people who come by and talk. But unfortunately, the employees don't come in because it is just too fancy for them. What does he do? He hires an assistant as a liaison between himself and the employees because he is so busy doing front office work that he cannot do the back office work. The quality of the relationship breaks down, as does morale and probably productivity.
All of this is for one reason: the superintendent's ego satisfaction. Complicated plans aren't for greater productivity; often, they are because someone's ego got involved. Anytime someone's plan is too complex check it out for ego problems.
The second thing is this: Plans need to be flexible. An excellent example of this is Henry Ford and his Model T. He liked it; he had a plan. The fact that customers had changed from wanting it had nothing to do with it. He had an inflexible plan. Of course, he offered the customers the choice of color, as long as it was black. Then he ran into trouble with the inflexibility. Your plan should be flexible enough so that you don't have to force circumstances to fit the plan, but instead have a plan that fits the circumstances without self-destructing.
The third thing in planning is that we should make it objective. By objective I mean taking out the emotional feelings about the plan as much as possible. Construct the plan with common sense. When we take the scientific approach to planning we are increasing the odds. We are trying to improve the law of averages, aren't we?
