During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.
I have found in my experience of war, that plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.
Vision is nothing without a plan to execute it.
People are in such a hurry to launch their product or business that they seldom look at marketing from a bird's eye view and they don't create a systematic plan.
The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow.
Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.
Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.
A goal without a plan is only a dream.
Even military ministers have no more than a certain amount of control. It is customary that they have the right and the power to participate, from a political and military point of view, in the planning of actual operations.
The wise man bridges the gap by laying out the path by means of which he can get from where he is to where he wants to go.
We don't have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you'd find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company.
What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who's going to do what and how we're going to achieve the generic goals on the list.
If you plan it out, and it seems logical to you, then you can do it. I discovered the power of a plan.
Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
Only when you have got a clear statement of what you want to achieve, do you ask yourself how you are going to achieve it. In the military we are taught never to go for a single answer, no matter how obvious that might be.
Some weddings take longer to plan than others.
Pick a goal, make a realistic plan to reach that goal, work through each step of the plan, and repeat.
Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word.
I'm a very methodical writer. Before computers, I used reams of paper and stacks of index cards.
Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.
I've got lots and lots planned out, and other ideas knocking around in my head, too. I'm kind of an obsessive pre-planner, so I have a lot of material.
I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models.
If we're going to have an unconventional budget, we probably need an unconventional process to get there.
Without a plan, even the most brilliant business can get lost. You need to have goals, create milestones and have a strategy in place to set yourself up for success.
Planning means looking ahead.
