In breakfast, the chicken is involved, the pig is committed.
In the business planning process, commitment is essential.
- Use the SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to start discussion. SWOT brings team members into the strategic discussion. It makes strategy understandable. Your managers have to be part of the team that discusses strategy.
- Make the budgeting elements of the planning process visible. Managers should see what their peers are spending and should hear why. One of the best things I ever watched, as a consultant, was a management group that argued over the activity budgets during the planning process. Each manager had to defend his or her budget, showing what sales and marketing budgets would come out of it. There was a lot of peer pressure.
- Make sure people know that actual results will be compared to plan. With time, in a company that uses the planning process, this becomes second nature. In the beginning, however, it is extremely important that the main company owners and operators set the standards by scheduling plan review meetings each month and attending them. This has to be important.
— Tim
Are you saying that entrepreneurs and business owners are supposed to be as committed to their business as the pig is to breakfast?
Are we supposed to sacrifice our lives for the business? Work ourselves to death? Guarantee and then yield up a pound of our very flesh for the company, trading our existence for its?
No, that’s not what I’m saying, and thanks for asking. I’m saying that the planning process helps commit people in business to doing what they say they are going to do. We’re in a specific context in this post: planning process, managing results, and comparing actual results to planned results.
And even there, commitment vs. involvement in business doesn’t involve death like it does for the pig. The breakfast image is a figure of speech.