Read the opening
The Leader’s Handbook to Effective Managerial Planning
Foreword
Most business plans fail long before anyone tries to execute them.
I have spent thirty years working alongside business leaders, advising and visiting clients in sixty-two countries across five continents, from family firms to global corporations. That range taught me one thing above all: the principles in these pages are not cultural preferences. They hold in Copenhagen, Cincinnati and Singapore alike. And I have never been more certain of this – the gap between organisations that plan well and those that do not is one of the most consequential, and most avoidable, gaps in business.
Three patterns account for most of it, and you will recognise all three.
Some leaders simply do not believe in planning – neither the process nor the value of a written plan. Others go through the motions diligently every year, producing a beautifully formatted document nobody refers to, though it looks well on the shelf. And most common of all: leaders convinced that hard work matters more than smart work, who wear their busyness like a badge of honour while quietly wondering why the results never quite match the effort.
These are not unusual stories. They are the most common stories in business, and they share a root cause – the absence of a practical, integrated framework for leadership and planning that leaders can actually use.
When I ask why planning defeats them, the most common answer is that they do not know where to start. Others have tried and found the process overwhelming. One business owner described an online planning tool as being like assembling an IKEA wardrobe: the instructions complicated, the parts not quite fitting, and halfway through you are left wondering why you started. As with all poorly assembled furniture, the result tends to wobble under pressure.
In fairness, I admire IKEA. How could you not? The fault lay with the planning tool, not the flat-pack. But the comment stayed with me, because if planning feels like flat-pack furniture, no wonder so many leaders avoid it – and the absence of planning is so often the root cause of underperformance. Organisations without clarity of direction struggle to prioritise, waste their resources, and leave their best people disengaged.
That comment set the two aims that shaped everything I have written since. The first was to demystify planning. It has been made to sound like a specialist discipline – practised by consultants, conducted in frameworks, written in a language that keeps ordinary managers at a polite distance. It is nothing of the kind. It is a sequence of honest questions asked in the right order, and almost anyone can learn to ask them.
The second was to simplify it. Not to make it easy – the choices are hard, and a method that made them feel easy would be lying to you. But to strip out everything that was there for the look of the thing rather than because a decision depended on it. Every framework in this book earns its place by changing what a leadership team decides. Anything that only made the document longer has gone.
Those two aims turn out to be the same aim viewed from different sides. Demystifying is what makes a method teachable; simplifying is what makes it repeatable. And a method that can be taught and repeated is one whose results are a design rather than a hope – which is where this book gets its title.
I should say plainly that I have been on the wrong side of this myself, and that the lesson cost me something.
Some years later I joined a company as Managing Director, arrived with a conviction about planning I had spent most of my career building, and was soon invited to present “my” process to the management team. I was delighted. I knew it worked; I had seen it work. And I failed completely – not partially, completely. The room was polite and unconvinced, and by the end the idea was quietly dead.
It took me a while to understand why. The process was logical to me, so I had assumed it would be logical to everyone. I had handed people my conclusions and expected them to feel like their own. They did not – because they had not helped to build them. That is a lesson I have never forgotten, and it is one of the reasons this book is written the way it is.
Fortunately, setbacks tend to make me more stubborn. The idea did not stay dead. In time – and with far better storytelling – that same company built a planning process on the principles you will find in these pages, and it changed how the business made decisions, delivered and grew.
The Foreword continues for a further two pages, and leads into a room in Oslo twenty-five years ago. I will send you both, now.
One email, straight away. Nothing else unless you ask.
Thirteen chapters, a six-pillar readiness assessment, three planning stages and the rhythm that keeps a plan alive — with a facilitator’s manual and thirty templates ready to run it.
Publishers and media →Bo Brønserud · Results. By Design. · Nordic soul. American engine.