“Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I’d toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy… Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.” – Mark McCormack, US entrepreneur (1930-2003)
Do you agree with McCormack’s statement that business plans lose their effect a few years down the line? It does seem that for the majority of industries, planning has to be an ongoing process and not something you do once and then forget about. Technology changes so fast that anything is difficult to predict – for example, five years ago social media was still quite niche for business and now it is ubiquitous.
How long do you plan for and do you have an example of a time when a long-term plan was made redundant by technological changes?
