Back to the Future
One of the most important principles in business is also one of the simplest: before you can decide what to do next, you must know where you are trying to go. For decades, personal development thinkers have emphasized the importance of focusing on the desired outcome. The Secret popularized the idea that clearly imagining what you want helps bring it into reality. Napoleon Hill expressed a similar principle through his belief that what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Business success requires more than positive thinking, of course. Visualization without execution is merely daydreaming with better public relations. But a clearly defined future provides the context in which effective action becomes possible. In my strategic planning work, I used an approach called Market-Focused Planning. Rather than building a plan around internal activities, existing products or yesterday’s assumptions, the process began with the customer. The objective was to
