The Strategic Planning.

 ‘If you will give me 6 hours to cut down a tree,

I’ll spend 5 hours to sharpen my axe.’

‘Never worry when you are surrounded on all sides by your enemies. That is the best chance to attack on any side.’ – Two quotes that I always look up to when I think about the word strategy.

How to measure success in terms of money is a much debated question. I will try drawing a few conclusions with regard to success in terms of money with business in regard. If I am wrong, my friends specializing in Finance will correct me through.

Profit on sales, i.e. the profit margin is clearly not adequate by itself. For profit is, profit margin multiplied by the rate of turnover of capital. Profit margin is a meaningful figure, only because it shows where the opportunities for profit improvement lie. ROI makes sense, but is one rupee invested in business in 1900, same as today? What about Economies of scale? So, for measuring success with regard to business in terms of money turning out to be futile, my question is can it be a limitation?

The objectives of the business must not exceed the profitability with which it can expect to operate. It has to reliable, measurable, time bound and realistic. The profitability and the companies objectives must go hand in hand, or else the objectives has to be pruned, the company’s eyes ought not to be bigger than its stomach (Peter Drucker).

In such a case, when we talk about strategic planning towards any business, it is in terms of building a satisfied customer. Be it in any form, if you want to do a CSR activity, build a cult brand by tapping into the higher order needs of the customer ultimately it all depends on how the brand ( be it yourself, or your business) is positioned in the minds of the stakeholders. Now strategies for businesses is to build a satisfied customer! On the flip side, is it also about making the customer feel he is actually satisfied? While the actual beneficiary is the one who does the business?

Amidst all the gala happening around the Digital India campaign, and changing the profile picture in Facebook in support towards it, what we miss is that the plot is strategically played by Mark, while many of us are not even aware of our actions. In my view, this is an excellent strategic play by the ceo, playing with the herd mentality of every Indian. What it will mean is that, in future in case internet.org comes up, the start-ups will no longer find it easy to take it up against the giants- one ramification which will be really huge among the others, and as his expected plot we have also started following it without thinking it through.

Strategic planning is always like a game of chess. It must be thought through before being implemented, and in our lives the most common issue that we come up with is the term stress.

Can we strategically overcome it? Yes.

Stop worrying, start being mindful

Mindfulness- is being in present with acceptance. Very often, we're all stuck in our heads.

Two important A’s that I want mention here are the attention and acceptance, because these are the two things which we happily forget, and keep expecting a better state of life. Why? We ‘feel’ we deserve the best.

We're not taking the world in; we're just listening to the stories we tell ourselves about the world, trusting the endless parade of thoughts flitting through our heads instead of actually paying attention to life around us.

One of the fundamental tenets of mindfulness is that we all take our thoughts way too seriously. We think our thoughts always mean something. In fact, we think we are our thoughts and our thoughts are us.

And that's one of the reasons we worry so much and experience so many negative emotions — because we take our thoughts about the world more seriously than the world itself.

Remember, this practice is not about emptying the mind, getting rid of difficult emotions, escaping life's problems, being free of pain, or experiencing never-ending bliss. Mindfulness practice is about embracing our experience as it is—and sometimes what is can be unpleasant at the moment… We usually try to feel better by decreasing the intensity of painful experiences, we resort to short terms practices which will really make us feel better; in mindfulness practice, we work instead to increase our capacity to bear them. Trust me, it works and makes you feel more confident. Acceptance is really important- in much clearer terms it is about staying in tune with the realities.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, however sharp your strategy maybe, unless there is a flawless execution it might never see the dawn.