MITCHELL and COMPANY - Management Process

Achieve Your Company's Goals Sooner and More Safely

-FUTURE MANAGEMENT-

The Problem of Creating the Future Results You Want

When Dorothy first entered the land of Oz, the best advice she received was to follow the Yellow Brick Road. Whenever she was away from the Yellow Brick Road, problems arose that delayed her return to Kansas, her goal.

Like Dorothy, your company has a Yellow Brick Road that it can follow too.

Chances are that you have some plans to get to your goals. What do you think the chances are that those plans will direct you in the fastest and safest way? If you are like the average successful company, the odds are about one in a hundred. If you agree with that statement, go on to the Benefits section of this paper on the next page. If you disagree, read on here.

Why? Unlike Dorothy's Yellow Brick Road, your path is hard to see in most places . . . so you can wander off and can't find your way back, or experience substantial delays due to unexpected detours.

Granted, you probably have plans that add up, are spelled correctly, and look terrific on the page. But these plans probably make one or more of the following assumptions:

You know enough about the future to forecast it or to deal with the unexpected

You can implement anything you can conceive of on a predetermined timetable, set to maximize your convenience

Your actions will create no serious side effects such as customer defections, competitive responses, or regulatory shifts.

If you think about each of these assumptions, they are pretty far fetched in many situations. Imagine being a Japanese company finishing a five-year plan in early December 1942 just before the attack was launched on Pearl Harbor. Or an American company in the Defense industry just before the Berlin Wall fell. Or IBM in 1987. Or Sears in 1992. Or Philip Morris in 1997. You get the idea.

Although change is not always spectacular for an individual company, I cannot remember the last time that I saw a plan where the company achieved the numbers for the fifth year, close to what was first projected five years earlier. Companies vary in how well they meet their timetables, and I have even seen some who almost never meet a deadline. I have also never seen a company that always met their selected time targets.

Many executives tell me that the delay from the time they act until a competitor reacts is becoming smaller and smaller, so that they have a hard time imagining a competitive edge that will last. Others tell me that their customers are becoming ever more fickle, and hard to please when they are not shifting to the competition.

If a company made all three assumptions I listed above and was right 80% of the time in each area, what would that mean for their error rate concerning the future? The net result would be 51% accuracy across the 3 areas (.8 X .8 X .8). If the areas where the errors occurred were of above-average importance, the net effect could be as bad as being wrong more than half the time.

In practice, forecasting key factors accurately is usually less than 20%, achieving goals on schedule occurs about 50% of the time, and avoiding serious side effects occurs only about 10% of the time. If we multiply this out (.2 X .5 X .1), the result is one in a hundred. If you still disagree that this may be the case for your company, you need read no further. You either have no problem that needs to be solved, or do not yet have the experience to understand this kind of problem.

Company Benefits from Future Management

You already have goals and objectives. Future Management will let you know which actions will take you to those goals and objectives in the fastest and safest ways. Future Management will make the Yellow Brick Road to your future clear to you.

Last year, we held a site visit at Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley, and the car I rented came with a satellite-based navigation system. I never spent so little time getting to places I had never been to before. Three cars left our hotel to meet for dinner at a restaurant 20 miles away in San Francisco around the same time during rush hour. Our car left last by ten minutes yet arrived first by five minutes, and using the navigation system we took a route that I would never have considered. The car that came in second used local knowledge of someone from the area. The car that followed directions that the restaurant provided arrived last, even though it was the first to leave. Future Management is like that satellite-based navigation system.

When you have begun to set your goals and objectives, you can then use Future Management to tell you how hard it will be to meet those goals and objectives. If the goals and objectives are much too hard or much too easy, you can adjust them accordingly. Future Management allows you to realistically decide how much stretch is the right amount for your company. Should earnings growth be 14% or 24% per year? You may recall the research that was done with sales people tossing paper balls into a waste paper basket. If they always got them in or never got them in, the sales people were bored or frustrated and made little effort. When the sales people could get 20-40% in the waste paper basket, they had a great time, put forth a lot of effort and accomplished a lot.

Like the satellite-based navigation systems, Future Management builds you a road map that is constantly corrected for where you are, and gives you accurate choices to arrive at your destination. This means that once you have set your goals and objectives, you can constantly check for the best actions to take to achieve those goals and objectives.

Future Management locates the most effective actions for you by a unique technology involving the combination of qualitative information using interviews with customers, consumers, competitors, suppliers, and those who are affected by your actions combined in a quantitative way. This work is parallel in structure to what we have been doing in stock-price improvement for well over a decade, except this management technology is broader so that it applies to all of your aims.

With the right goals and objectives and the best actions now in mind, Future Management will tell you how hard it will be to implement these actions. This means that if many actions will be difficult to do, you can decide to pursue combinations of the actions so that your risk of not succeeding is brought down to appropriate and comfortable levels.

As you begin to implement these new directions, Future Management provides you with the milestones that tell you if you are on target. If you are off target (like accidentally turning onto the wrong road using the satellite-based navigation systems), Future Management will take your experience into account and direct you on a revised path that will minimize the delay to your goals and objectives.

Clients always ask me to quantify the potential size of the financial benefits from these new technologies. That is difficult to do, but I can say with confidence that this new technology provides company benefits much larger than all the previous technologies combined that we have released in the past. This is a breakthrough.

You will be pleased to know that benefits begin to be enjoyed within 9 weeks of starting on this work. Full benefits are usually reached in a particular business area within 6 months. The amount of time involved by management is limited unless you decide to do all of the research yourself into best practices to create the database for the road map. The best practice work can be outsourced to those who have appropriate expertise to save management time, and speed up the time for receiving the benefits. When you rent a car to go down the highway, you do not design and build the car and its navigation system. You are probably wise to seek help in this instance as well.

Personal Benefits from Future Management

Imagine having your career tied to a company that was going nowhere . . . or worse, that is about to run off a cliff. Future Management is a great way to reduce the likelihood of having company performance harm your career.

Do you receive some of your compensation based on the overall performance of the company or the company's stock? With Future Management, that compensation will be higher.

Do you enjoy stimulating challenges rather than impossible tasks or mind-numbing repetition? Future Management will allow you to drive into interesting and valuable new territories for your personal development.

Do you like to have some idea of how you are doing before a problem arises? If you dislike unpleasant surprises in your business, Future Management is the management technology for you.

Do you want to be a better leader? What better way to be a guide to easy, fun, successful change than to have a great map of where you are heading? Future Management is that map.

Using Future Management Now

Many people do not like to experiment with new technologies with something as important as the direction of the entire company.

Future Management is immune from that concern about experimentation because you can apply it to a small operation as a test, if you like, or you can use it merely to check your own judgment. The information behind Future Management (like a good road map, with an arrow that says "You are here") can allow you to make better decisions, whether or not you use the directions suggested by Future Management. In other words, you can run in parallel with Future Management (like you do with a new computer system) before you replace how you make decisions now.

How to Get Started

I want to help you personally to achieve the wonderful benefits that will help you and your company have a better life and future. We should begin by discussing this over the telephone, and develop a joint plan of how you and your company should evaluate and design a way to begin using this powerful map to a better future. To keep these materials shorter, I have not included details of the process, but I would be happy to provide those details to you whenever you wish.

You can speed your progress by e-mailing me at askdonmitchell@yahoo.com just as soon as you finish reading this. Or you can reach us by e-mail at: mitchell@fastforward400.com and we can respond the next day.

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