Let’s look at four sound principles of a healthy organisation, starting with the first:

Effective Planning

In many small and or growing companies, the process of planning falls by the wayside. Too much time is spent dealing with the day to day juggles and challenges, and frankly, fire fighting. There is little congruence, no shared vision, and therefore no collective strength. The company ship is drifting like the QE II into a Solent sandbank.

As any worthy management training course will tell you, a business needs to have a clear set of goals, which accurately reflects what’s important to its success. These goals need to be disseminated throughout the organisation. When this occurs, it’s much more likely that managers and staff alike can act pro-actively, with clear prioritisation, and consideration of how they need to allocate their precious resources.

It’s therefore a key function of management (at different levels, depending on your organisation’s hierarchical structure) to develop these goals and begin planning ways in which they are going to meet them.

Has your company got, or is actively working on a long term business plan?
When was the last time, that schedules were arranged for key thinkers to review and formulate a planning strategy?

Planning is the core engine behind successful organisations. Remember the following (watershed friendly) version of an old phrase:

Paltry Poor Planning = Paltry Poor Performance