The purpose of strategic planning is to plan strategically – that much is self-evident – and the goal of planning strategically is to determine what objective the organization or company wants to achieve given its physical assets, the skills and competencies of its people, its implicit and explicit knowledge, its intellectual property and its financial resources. An analysis of the various combinations of these elements should enable the company to answer the question: “what should we be selling, at what price and in which markets?”

From this, the competent organisation should be able to derive tactical plans for the delivery of the strategic objective, plans that take into account market conditions, market trends, and the possibility (if not the probability) of positive and negative ‘black swan’ events. (For an explanation of ‘black swan’ events, it is worth reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book that should be compulsory reading for all managers and especially strategic planners.)

Unfortunately, while the strategic objective setting is often done well, the tactical delivery has often clearly failed – one only has to think of Lehman Brothers and the other big banks that crashed the world economy in the last four years. One can also look at General Motors and their appalling record of incompetence that led inexorably to the company seeking protection from their (often very angry) creditors through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. One can also look more recently at BP and the Deepwater Horizon disaster as well the company that built and operated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that has been wrecked by the recent earthquake in Japan (given its site, right on the tectonic fault line, this was hardly an unexpected negative black swan event!)

Which ever way it is looked at, the failure of companies and their managers to develop proper tactical plans and effective execution is lamentable but it is also understandable given the super-sized egos of those managers and directors who have been at the head of these organisations. No matter what ‘they’ might say to the contrary, given the current management styles and centralised power structures, it is exceptionally difficult for young managers and middle managers to make themselves properly heard at this upper and often selectively deaf level. Their careers are at the mercy of the whims of their seniors and it is all to easy to get labelled as ‘not a team player’ if they are brave enough to question the assumptions that underpin the certainties of the commercial barons, many of whom have avidly read Sun Zu’s The Art of War and who see themselves as some sort of modern day war lord. These ‘war lords’ have centralised power to themselves to such an extent that there are no longer effective checks-and-balances in place to ensure that disaster can be averted.

It is, perhaps, inevitable, therefore that those companies with cultures built around the cult of the leader and which have handed CEOs such power should have forgotten the aphorism that ‘power corrupts and total power corrupts totally’ and although these senior managers are not, perhaps, ‘corrupt’ in the modern financial sense they have certainly lost the humility and sense of reality that those in power must have if they are to succeed in the long term.

And perhaps that is the point, ‘succeed in the long term’ has become a joke: one senior manager in a large multi-national bank said to me quite recently “short term planning is about what happens today, long term planning is about what we need to achieve next week” and I don’t think he was actually joking! The entire mind-set of modern western business is so focused on the short term that managers no longer know how to or care to plan for the future. The trouble is, unfortunately, much of western corporate culture does not allow for the flexibility of response nor the understanding of ambiguity that is essential if we are to survive long term.

In truth, perhaps the current western business culture is so corrupted that is was bound to fail and managers and management thinkers are in thrall to some long dead theorist who once believed that since the future is unknowable and the past is unchangeable we should live only in the present. Indeed, perhaps the entire capitalistic philosophy is a sham and Marx and Engels were right, perhaps we are now seeing the inevitable end game of capitalism as practiced in the western world and in those countries that aspire to emulate it.

And who is to blame for this rather parlous state of affairs? Well, the idea of the nation state, the culture of the self and the ego, and the current curriculum of many leading business schools all come to mind.

And how can this be fixed? Well, not easily is probably the most honest answer, but a change to more collaboration and less egoism, more working with others rather than blind competition, more acceptance of responsibility and less rule by diktat, and a greater understanding of the behavioural aspects of management would all help. This at least would be a start and it is the business schools that must lead the way if they are to remain relevant in the modern world. For the last sixty years, the MBA and undergraduate business management curriculum developed and promoted short-termism, ‘analysis of the numbers’, and the scientific approach to management and we are currently reaping the bitter harvest of being wrong. A new approach to business education is sorely needed and it must start now! Only then will business climb out of its current reviled state and once again be seen as the way to a better world.

People seem to either love or hate the big publishers and either support or are contemptuous of the self-publishing fraternity. Publishing is a business and there are simply two different business models here.

The big (traditional) publishers are operating with a very well established but inflexible business model that relies heavily of bringing out as many books as possible so that they obtain volume-based market share. Their competitive advantage is their professionalism, their financial clout, and their access to the book-retailing sector combined with their extensive market intelligence. Their competitive disadvantages are their incredibly slow product development cycle (the time it takes to bring a new book to market) and their very poor product acquisition strategies (how they actually find new authors/books that will give them market share or the greatest publicity).

The small publishers (and that is what self-publishers are) have a more flexible business model that focuses on niche market opportunities but they also have different competitive advantages and disadvantages. Their competitive advantages include low costs, the ability to bring a product to market very quickly, and the fact that their business model allows them to establish new and different ways of finding new authors or books to publish and new and different ways of marketing. Their disadvantages are that they usually lack financial strength, lack significant access to the retailing side of the book trade combined with limited market intelligence, and some lack in-house professional competencies in editing, designing and marketing books.

The two models are at either end of the spectrum – neither is better than the other as they are differentiated by doing different things, or doing the same things in different ways.

Looking at this as an author (three best-selling management books published by Piatkus Books – part of Little, Brown), I really appreciated the support and professionalism of the Piatkus team when they brought out my books. At the time, I simply did not have the experience or the time to consider publishing my own books. Now, nearly fifteen years on, I can say that I do have the professionalism, knowledge and ability to publish my own books – if that is what I need to do. I have set up White & MacLean Publishing to publish and provide partnership publishing in the fields of fantasy fiction, thrillers, management/business, social sciences and history. I certainly write in the thriller and management fields but the editorial decisions on whether we will publish my books will depend on quality.

So how do we decide what to publish? Well, I work as a professional editor in the fields of business and management, social sciences and history; the MacLean of the company title (my wife) is a professional editor in the social sciences field – a huge category that includes, for her, conflict resolution, gender issues, security (food and fuel), economics, and politics. And we have a partner who is a top fiction editor. So, White & MacLean make their editorial decisions based on in-house experience and competencies. We sub-contract to trusted outsiders that which we cannot do in-house, and we are constantly developing new and different ways of approaching the market.

But does this mean I am also a ‘self-publishing’ author? I leave that up to others to decide – I don’t see it that way as I don’t see ‘self-publishing’ as anything other than a different route to market.

The success or failure of those authors who decide to publish their own work will depend on whether they can establish a competitive advantage by doing so – by being more professional, or less expensive, quicker in bringing books to market or being a niche player. However, they also need to think through whether they are competent, capable and have sufficient business acumen to do the job properly – if they have, then they should succeed but if they don’t, then they will fail. To self-publish (or take any other route to market) should be a business decision not an emotional or emotive one.

The issue is not whether ‘self-publishing’ should or should not be a business option but whether or not the author has the sense to understand that that their manuscript/book is simply one more product in the market – very few of us are likely to produce a work of such outstanding brilliance that it will leap off the shelves of its own volition and make us millions – unfortunately, an awful lot of authors simply don’t understand that. Self-publishing rubbish is self-defeating but there again, traditionally publishing rubbish is equally self-defeating. Indeed, rubbish is rubbish no matter who writes it or publishes it.

Although the research suggests that corporate email suffers slightly less badly that private email – 66% of corporate emails are considered spam as against 82% of private emails – it still means that thousands of man-hours are being wasted in receiving and deleting non-productive mail. I recently put this to some senior managers and their response was that their corporate email filters were highly effective and so their people didn’t receive spam – but the research suggests this might be an error of perception. Radicati’s research suggests that 65% of all corporate spam messages are being delivered – and are thus deleted by the end-user. That is a staggering 39 billion corporate spam messages a day are actually reaching the in-boxes of business email users. This is estimated to cost businesses around $20.5 billion in decreased productivity and technical expenses.

The question that needs asking and answering is ‘what is spam?’ Okay, we all have a definition in our minds but mine would be ‘all email that contains irrelevant and/or inappropriate content and which was unsolicited by the end-user’. Using this definition, I have to say that a lot of spam may well be generated internally in organizations whose people have adopted a communication strategy that basically involves telling everyone about everything for fear of being ‘left out of the loop’.

Of course, there is also the spam that offers anatomical enhancement, prolongation of sexual performance, gorgeous ladies from Russia who just want to be your friend, over the counter pharmaceuticals, new/used/repaired mobile phone hand sets, and so on. According to figures produced by the Sophos, the internet security company, in 2005 over 60% of all spam produced in the world came from just four countries – the US which produced 24.5%, China including Hong Kong which produced 22.3%, South Korea which produced 9.7% and France which produced 5%. When I reviewed the content of my company and private spam boxes today, I would have to say that the figures for the US seem rather low and in my case it is closer to 75-85% comes from the USA.

The need to ensure that employees are not bombarded with spam and other irrelevant email is causing some companies to investigate the use of social-networking technology (the Facebook model) for their internal communications. This sets up its own issues, but at least you could chose who you receiving messages from.