Mike Tyson was asked his thoughts on Evander Holyfield’s fight plan before a WBA Heavyweight Title bout and famously responded:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
As we shift from Q3 to Q4 this week, brand planning season is in full swing for 2025, even as final 2024 numbers come into clearer view.
The process includes a lot of horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target. The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable. The leadership team sets a top-down stretch target that is much higher. Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers.
A plan is outdated the moment it’s inked. Things change: customers change their mind, new opportunities surface, roadblocks appear.
But a good plan helps us respond, not react, to those changes. I like this insight from Mark Ritson a few years ago:
“Ignore the agility junkies who reject the need for any plan or demand something shorter-term. Of course, a strategy will always deviate as events unfold in unexpected ways. You need agility. But it does not replace the requirement of an initial strategy, from which to deviate in an agile manner.
“That agility will be sparked by unknown events that will occur down the track, but strategy demands an a priori approach that pre-exists and predicates the nimbleness.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
