Planning - The Foundation for Success The sun is not only thing in life that can sneak up on you. If we don't prepare ourselves well, in advance, we can find ourselves on wrong side of success in our career, our social life and even in important relationships. So just what can we do to keep critical mistakes of life from sneaking up on us? The simple answer is to plan. Strategic planning is a concept that is an absolute must for any business that wants to succeed. But this principle is not just for business. You will have to plan for any area of your life where you want to see success. Of course there has to be action and activity - stuff you do. You also have to have exert energy. But before any of that will have any meaning, you have to know where it all needs to be directed. That is purpose of planning. Planning has to be built on a particular foundation. There are plenty of resources that give you a clear 1-2-3 system for doing planning. We are not going there in this article. What we want to look at are underlying elements of planning. If we take time to put these elements in place first, actual process of planning takes on an entirely new level of meaning.

Principle The most basic foundation stone relates to basic principles that guide operation of your life and your business. Principle defines parameters within which you will work. It defines how you will relate with other people, kind of integrity you will operate by, places you will do business, and even type of products and services you will offer. Once you decide your parameters of operation, everything you do will fit inside of that. There will be things you will do and things you won’t do based on it. Too often people don’t start their strategic planning at this level. They skip it and go right on to purpose. But even purpose has to come from somewhere. You will never have a complete handle on what you are doing unless you start by defining and understanding basic principles you will operate under.

PR: Focus on What Matters!

Sure, as a manager, you have a talented member of PR team assigned to your department, division or subsidiary, or housed at your agency, and s/he is darn good at placing product and service plugs on radio and in newspaper. Which may be all you want. And that’s fine.

Unfortunately, when your PR folks concentrate primarily on tactical fixes like publicity placements, at least be aware of what you are NOT getting.

You don’t get a comprehensive effort that persuades those important outside folks to your way of thinking, then moves them to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed.

You don’t get use of high-impact, fundamental premise of public relations to deliver external stakeholder behavior change – kind that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives.

And you don’t get creative potential of your assigned PR team needed to positively impact behaviors of very outside audiences that MOST affect your business, non-profit or association.

That’s a fair amount NOT to be getting!

It certainly doesn’t sound like best use of your public relations resources, but it’s fixable. In which case, you might begin to see results such as prospects starting to do business with you; fresh proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures; membership applications on rise; customers starting to make repeat purchases; capital givers or specifying sources starting to look your way, community leaders beginning to seek you out; welcome bounces in show room visits; politicians and legislators starting to view you as a key member of business, non-profit or association communities, and even higher employee retention rates.

From Day 1, you have to get public relations people assigned to your unit on board. Make certain they all accept realities that it’s vitally important to know how your outside audiences perceive your operations, products or services. And that perceptions almost always lead to behaviors that can hurt your unit.

Get your team involved in plans for monitoring and gathering perceptions by questioning members of your most important outside audiences. Questions like these: how much do you know about our organization? Have you had prior contact with us and were you pleased with interchange? How much do you know about our services or products and employees? Have you experienced problems with our people or procedures?