🔥 Hot Take Alert #4: Annual Planning Is a Colossal Waste of Time

Planning is hard because it's inherently different from other exercises your organization takes on . Rather than focusing on day-to-day execution, it requires a large number of people to think about a variety of possible futures, align on one single future, and then plot a concrete course to get there. Taking this on for your own personal goals (f

Remember, plans always get more complicated once they're put into practice — never less.

New priorities emerge, market forces change, and everything takes longer than you expect. Your plan needs focus — likely more focus than you might feel comfortable with.

buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a

We had been creating an annual road map and doing annual budgeting, but those processes took so much time, and the effort wasn’t worthwhile because we were wrong all the time. I mean, really, we were making it up. Whatever our projections were, we knew they would be wrong in six months, if not three. So we just stopped doing annual planning. All th