A Man, a Can, a Plan

My mom bought my brother a cookbook called, A Man, a Can, a Plan. It suggests quick meals that are as easy as mixing and heating various combinations of canned pantry foods.  (Yum!)

A plan is needed for something as simple as fixing a quick meal, but more importantly, we need a strategy in our business, personal, and professional lives to show us where to go and how to get there.

I’ll agree with you right off the bat.  Creating a plan sounds like a pain.  Who has time to research, brainstorm, and document a vision and how you will execute it?  Who wants to monitor what a competitor is doing, establish a target market, or find ways to improve?  And revisiting and tweaking that plan so it reflects changes within your company or in the marketplace?  Forget it!

The truth is; however, we can’t afford not to plan.

It is easy to be busy and go about daily tasks without a clear and specific strategy. But priorities shift.  Our internal and external environments, along with our vision, change. Without focus, we lose sight of what is important. We stay comfortable, urgently putting out the same fires every day. 

We need to be proactive.  We need to take our business, our personal life, and our career, into our own hands. 

Even a man with a can has a plan!  But it shouldn’t stop there...

How could strategy work for you?