I like Bill Brelsford’s Killing PowerPoint isn’t the Answer posted today in his Small Business Tools blog. PowerPoint doesn’t make presentations, people do.  Blaming the tool is sloppy thinking. Tools that help are good, thank you very much, even if some people misuse them. Next we’ll be blaming word processing for bad writing, or spreadsheets for bad analysis.

— Tim

Yesterday I was keynote speaker at the University of Portland’s "Introduction 2 Venture" event. They had asked me to talk about entrepreneurship from a personal point of view, which I took to mean stories of Palo Alto Software, Borland International, business plan consulting, etc.

During the Q&A somebody asked me what I thought about the future of business planning and business plan software. Interesting question, one that I’ve lived with for many years.

The critical point here is that business planning process makes businesses better. I think the future of business planning is steadily less emphasis on the plan as document and more emphasis on the planning process as management. Business planning does get easier with every new version of Business Plan Pro (disclosure: my work, I’m biased) and what I see is that as it does, people do more of it. As I wrote earlier today in Invention is the Mother of Necessity, as software makes some tasks easier, we demand more of them.

As time goes on, more people are going to use planning as process to manage their businesses better. More will see the power of regular plan review, regular plan-vs.-actual analysis, regular milestones management, and using it all to manage teams and priorities. As this happens it will improve the quality of business planning software as well as of business planning. We’ll all start to look at built-in plan-vs.-actual analysis, regular plan reviews, and software that makes that happen.

Have you heard the standard cliche: "Necessity is the Mother of Invention?" In business productivity, in my experience at least,  the old standard is reversed: the new truth is that Invention is the Mother of Necessity."

For example:

1. Spreadsheets and Budgeting: When I started in business analysis back in the middle 1970s we didn’t have spreadsheets, and a budget was rarely more than a list of numbers on a yellow pad processed with a calculator and a pen. Then came Visicalc, and shortly after that Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel. Now, not at all by coincidence, everybody in business does a whole lot more budgeting and spreadsheets than we ever would have imagined back then.

   So what’s happened is that because spreadsheets made budgeting more accessible, the world started demanding more budgets. To me, this is a good thing. Budgeting is good for business. You could argue, however, that maybe the world of small and medium-sized business was better off when the world summarized budgets into a few key items.

   Ultimately, in this case, I think it’s obvious that we do more budgets because budgets are easier to do

2. Desktop publishing and business documents: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same thing happen with desktop publishing. Before desktop publishing appeared with the Macintosh and the Apple Laserwriter in the middle 1980s, people put business correspondence onto simple pages printed onto letterhead paper. Nowadays we take desktop publishing tecniques for granted. People routinely merge graphics and text onto simple memos and letters and standard business documents, without thinking twice about it.

Did This Improve Productivity?

That’s an interesting question. Ten years ago I would have been tempted to say no, that it hasn’t improved productivity.  More recently I’ve changed my mind.  Running a company makes me sure that we benefit from the power of more detailed budgeting, and running through the daily process of management makes me pretty sure that business documents are generally better communicators with desktop publishing than without.

What do you think?