The Importance of Discovering Your Plan B

Have you ever said, “Always have a Plan B?” This interesting presentation from Changethis.com by John Mullins and Randy Komisar explains:

Most business plans assume that most everything is already known up front—not the case, as our examples have now shown. As the famed American general in World War II, Douglas MacArthur, is reputed to have once said, “No plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy.  The process articulated here is a healthy alternative to the straight-jacket of today’s business planning practices—to enable you to anticipate and move beyond a failing Plan A. It is a process designed for learning and discovering, rather than for pitching and selling. It’s a process that recognizes the cold, hard facts—most often, what ultimately works is not the Plan A that was so persuasively articulated in the original plan. Instead, it’s Plan B.

Click on the image below to read this insightful perspective.

Authors:

John Mullins teaches entrepreneurship and venture capital at the London Business School and in regular workshops on four continents. He is also the author of the definitive work on assessing entrepreneurial opportunities, The New Business Road Test.

Randy Komisar is a partner at the esteemed VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a lecturer on Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, and the author of the bestseller The Monk and the Riddle, which was selected as one of the top 100 business books of all time. Together they are the authors of Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model (Harvard Business Press, 2009).