This seeming paradox is loaded with wisdom, and provides a key glimpse into the genius of our former President, and Commander-in-Chief. Through this short quote, he gives us the very essence of a vital foundational skill that all business owners and managers must have to succeed over the long term.

Short term success is fleeting, and may have been achieved without a strong plan in place. It could have resulted from a little luck, good timing, and the stars and planets lining up just in the right orbits. But long term success – that day-in and day-out success repeated over a sustained period of time – is only going to result from thoughtful, strategic planning.

There are so many Entrepreneurs and Business Owners who rush in to business without a plan at all! The sad truth is that a lot of new businesses fail, for a variety of reasons. It could have been that the owner/manager didn’t properly identify the target customer, or the unmet need of the customer, or any number of things. But I bet one thing is for sure: they didn’t have a strong plan in place. Chances are, they didn’t even have a plan at all! Or at least not a written plan. After all, many people believe a business plan is boring, and painful…

And here’s the whole point of this article: It’s not the “plan” that you have that is going to determine if you succeed or not. It’s the planning process that is important! That’s because the “plan” is probably out of date by the time you actually need to use it: circumstances will have changed, competitors may be different, the economic conditions are no longer the same, etc. Naturally if you didn’t have a plan at all, of course, you just end up reacting every single time to whatever “crisis of the day” you’re facing. That’s not good. Not having a plan means you have to just make it up and “fly by the seat of your pants” each time. That’s exhausting, and it certainly decreases the odds of your success.

But even if you did have a plan, you might not be able be able to weather the crisis or challenge – especially if the “plan” that you had wasn’t really created and “owned” by you. If you just downloaded a template off the internet and shoved some words into each of the fields in order to create some nice looking “business plan” to show to your relative that you plan to hit up for an investment in your business, that’s not good… Chances are you did not learn HOW to plan, but only created a document that sits on your shelf and collects dust. Also, if you paid someone else to create your plan for you, you would likely not be in a position to critically evaluate the plan, or modify the plan as needed. Without a strong understanding of the fundamentals of strategic planning, you wouldn’t know if the plan being created for you was good or not. You would just have to take it on faith from the “expert” you hired to write your plan.

And going back to General Eisenhower, your plan is useless. But if you know HOW to plan, you would be able to adapt, change, and overcome any obstacles you’re sure to encounter along the way. That is the key, and that’s why your plan is useless, but planning is everything!

I believe that Strategy is HOW you get something done. It is not what you want to get done–that is your Objective (and I’ll write a separate article on that). So once you have your objective established, you know WHAT you’re going to do. But you don’t yet know HOW you’re going to do it. This is where Strategy comes in. It is the deliberate choice of HOW you’re going to accomplish your objective.

Strategy is my favorite part of business, because strategy represents choices. Everyone will usually agree on the business objective (the What), but many will disagree on the strategies (the How). This isn’t necessarily “bad” – there are many ways to get things done. Remember that because strategy represents choices, they are subject to debate. There can be good strategies, and bad strategies, or good strategies and better strategies. A given strategy could be good for one situation, but bad for another. A given strategy could be good for one person to do, but bad for another person.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example–just a silly one that easily drives the point home. Let’s say you’re stuck on the side of a river, and you want to get to the other side. (You’ve just established your objective, which is to get to the other side.) Now, what are your strategies going to be? This is HOW you’re going to accomplish your objective of getting to the other side of the river. Here are few strategies to consider:

• Look for a bridge and walk across
• Swim (or wade, if it’s shallow)
• Find a boat, or build a boat, and float across
• Find a strong animal, like a horse, and ride across on the animal
• Build a hot air balloon, and fly across

You get the idea. There are a lot of different strategies that you could use to get to the other side. What’s important is that you choose a strategy that you’re comfortable with, and that you know you can execute. If your chosen strategy is to swim, but you don’t know how to swim, or lack the endurance to swim more than 25 yards, and the river is 100 yards wide, then you’ve chosen a very bad strategy for you. It may be a great strategy for someone else who is a top-notch swimmer, but it’s a flawed strategy for you that could prove fatal!

With this silly little example of how to cross the river, many Entrepreneurs and business owners will come to understand that they haven’t really taken the time to determine what their business objectives are, and how they are going to use strategies to accomplish their objectives. They will come to realize that their existing “strategies” for their business are too broad, too far reaching, or too hard to implement. This little exercise of learning how to cross the river should help you reflect on how your strategies are or are not working for you.

Importantly, by choosing a strategy, you are also defining what you are not going to be doing! Think about that for a moment, because most people do not get this point. By stating your strategies of HOW you’re going to do something, you’re also implicitly stating what you are NOT going to be doing, because you would not want to do something that is off-strategy. This is a very common problem with Entrepreneurs, because they want to be able to do anything they want, at any time. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to turn down an order, or deny a paying customer, because it would be going against your selected strategy. But that is precisely what needs to happen to stay true to your business, your brand, and ultimately, to create an enduring success!

The primacy of the unmet need is the polar opposite of the mantra: “If we build it, they will come!” — a mantra that is a relic of the old industrial age. This old mantra suggested that by merely building it, you would be able to sell it. Perhaps Henry Ford himself contributed to this line of thinking by churning out Model-T Fords as fast as his new company could build them. In fact, he famously stated that “You can have any color car you want, as long as it’s black!” That mantra worked back in the industrial age, but it no longer applies today. The sad reality is that anyone who develops and launches a product into the marketplace today using this old mantra is essentially doomed to fail.

And therein lies the problem: so many Entrepreneurs fall in love with their own idea, and they naively believe that if they just get their idea to the market, then it will sell. Well as you might suppose, this just isn’t the case. You must determine what need is not getting met, and what problem exists that is waiting to be solved. And specifically, you need to do this for the target market that you plan to sell your product to. It doesn’t matter what your Mom thinks of your idea if you’re planning on selling your product to teenagers. That may seem obvious when you’re reading this, but many Entrepreneurs ignore this point, and base their decisions on what Mom or someone else thinks of their idea, even when their idea has nothing to do with Mom or that other person.

So again, what problem is your product, good, or service addressing and solving for your target customer? Are you making their life better? Does your product do something for them that no else can do? If you cannot answer these basic questions, then you need to stop what you’re doing, and spend some time getting this right. The whole idea of meeting an unmet need and solving a problem for your target customer is THE best practice from the most successful companies in the world. It is the definitive way to bring new products to the market, and to manage existing products in the marketplace. Ignoring this way of developing and launching products is just foolish.

That’s because if you don’t get this part right, at the very beginning, it won’t really matter what all the other things are that you do well after this point. Your product will most likely end up in the junkyard where all great products go that are not meeting any unmet needs, or solving any problems for the right customers.

There are certainly more steps than these, of course, but failing to address these critical items up front will decrease the odds of your success by a dramatic margin.

In business, and in particular, amongst Entrepreneurs, there’s a general sense that in order to succeed, you just need to be passionate about what you choose to do. I’ve talked about this with a lot of business people, from very senior corporate executives, to small business owners, to those who have failed in business and are now not working. And the general consensus is that people need passion. A common belief is that passion is the key ingredient in the “recipe” of business success.

I’ve met so many Entrepreneurs who believe that because they are so passionate about what they want to do, they simply cannot fail. Many of them have a framed print on their wall that usually depicts some inspiring image like a bald eagle, or a ship at sea, and the caption: “Belief fuels passion, and passion rarely fails.” These Entrepreneurs mistakenly believe that if they just bring more of their incredible energy, passion, and enthusiasm to their business, they’ll be able to overcome any obstacle through the shear strength of their willpower.

And then there are those timid souls who sit on the sidelines, and observe the train wreck and carnage that was somebody’s business that just failed, and casually comment that the owner just didn’t have enough passion. Are you kidding me? That owner probably worked himself/herself into the ground, gasping for air up until the very last moment. They probably have bloody knuckles from the fight, combined with intense sleep deprivation, stress, and ulcers, not to mention a depleted bank account, broken dreams, and despair. And I doubt that failed Entrepreneur is sitting around saying “Gee, if only I’d had just a little more passion…”

So to all the people who think that passion cannot fail, I would advise you to look around at the littered landscape of failed businesses and ask yourself why did those businesses fail? Ask yourself if you believe these failures wouldn’t have happened if only those failed Entrepreneurs had more passion. If only they would have tried harder… Do you really believe that? Of course not.

So there must be something more to business success that just finding something you’re passionate about and jumping in with both feet and running really fast! Certainly, as said in the very first paragraph, passion is a wonderful emotion and can contribute greatly to success in any endeavor. But passion alone is not enough, and if that’s your only tool in the business toolbox, you are most likely on your way to joining the many other passionate Entrepreneurs who lost big as they pursued their dreams. Because unfortunately, the fact is that most new businesses are going to fail in the first 12 months. That’s not meant to discourage you, it just is what it is. But you can do something about it: get yourself the skills and training you need to beat the odds. Combine your passion with the right skills and training, and now some truly great things are possible.

Principles are general and fundamental truths that are used in deciding conduct or making choices. They serve to guide and inform us, and illuminate the way. There are many examples of companies that have lost their way, and no longer have any recognizable, positive principles. They may have principles, but they are negativeones such as “Do whatever it takes to make money” or “Put the most money in my pocket as I can.” Certainly Enron could be considered a poster child for this entire group of companies, but there are many, and it would be unfair to just single out Enron.

Principles are the bedrock of a company, and they need to be given attention and made a priority. It does not suffice to just create a list of principles, and then never look at them again. Principles need to be discussed, and shared, and experienced at all levels of management in a company. As I already wrote above, principles serve to guide and inform, and they also “trump” any particular strategy or course of action that someone wants to take. For example, if one principle at Company X is to “buy green,” then that principle would trump any action that may go against it. Suppose an employee wanted to save a few dollars by buying a “non-green” product, let’s say office paper. In this case the employee, who thought he was doing something good like trying to save the company money, ended up violating his company principle of only buying green. This somewhat silly example is useful in helping to explain how principles are overarching and how they help a company stay on the right path–the path the company has chosen in advance.

The best thing that senior management can do is to ensure that their company has a set of principles that have been thoughtfully discussed and approved, and then they need to get the word out to all levels of the company. They need to talk about them frequently, in regular meetings and updates with everyone. Most importantly, they need to live them and set the example!

Interestingly, principles aren’t just for the big companies, by the way. Individual Entrepreneurs are well-served by establishing a set of principles for their own small company. One of my own principles is to not let work out-prioritize my family, and I need to remind myself of this principle from time to time to avoid drifting away from it and spending too much time at the office…