Drucker on Two-Track Planning.
I recently discovered in reading my copy of The Daily Drucker that I’ve long shared one of Peter F. Drucker’s main management philosophies – the concept of two-track planning.
For decades, I’ve heard the following sentiment.
“We can’t solve your problem because we haven’t done our strategic work yet.”
When I worked at other agencies, I always thought this to be the ultimate bureaucratic blindness.
Building the BRAND while we build the BUSINESS.
This is the core promise of our agency, DiMassimo Goldstein. This is the experience our clients have bought when they’ve bought us.
Not: “First we’ll build the brand, then we’ll build the business.”
Not: “First we’ll build the business, then we’ll build the brand.”
Instead, we do both, and simultaneously. Like you do!
Sometimes this translates as “Building the brand while lowering the cost of acquisition.”
Sometimes it’s “Building the brand while driving sales efficiency.”
Sometimes it’s just “Growing the business and the brand.”
Our clients never wait months to see returns from an agency engagement. We typically deliver measurable revenue within the first 30 days, and we don’t have to sacrifice future success to do it.
Drucker calls this the harmonization of the immediate and long-range future, going on to state that “a manager must, so to speak, keep his nose to the grindstone while lifting his eyes to the hills.”
At DiGo, we call this practice two-track planning, and it’s implemented in everything we do. Imagine two columns on a page, the left titled URGENT and the right titled IMPORTANT.
Some urgent things are truly unimportant, but some we term “The Runway.” The board meeting coming up. The quarterly results reporting. The partner’s meeting.
If a plane doesn’t get aloft by the end of the runway, it doesn’t matter how good the food service and the movie were going to be. There are things you just need in the short run to make the long run possible. Often these things include results. That’s the Runway.
And, we don’t lose our strategic heads. We see the long-term opportunities in urgent problems.
And we manage them both, so that our clients can move forward, paying for tomorrow’s opportunities with today’s wins, all while strategically planting the seeds that ensure growth for the future in a time-starved world.
Let’s talk about inspiring action in the short and long term!