Tài liệu Seven Steps to a Successful Business Plan Chapter 10-11 ppt

Pulling It All Together: The

Resources Plan

This chapter outlines the requirements for developing the fourth

of the series of the one-page business plans (see Figure 10-1).

The resources plan is the document that pulls all the requirements

for supporting your business plan together in one place. This

approach goes beyond the traditional view of people as the sole

resource. Resources are more than the human element. They con￾sist of all things necessary for you to accomplish your goals. There

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CHAPTER

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are at least ten items for consideration when building a resources

plan. Each is discussed in detail in the following sections.

268 Seven Steps to a Successful Business Plan

Figure 10-1. The resources plan helps you determine both short-term and

long-term requirements for core competencies in addition to other prereq￾uisites needed to accomplish the plan.

Probably our ancestors’ major concerns when hunting a wool￾ly creature were, “Do we have enough resources? Maybe we need a

few more hunters. Are the spears sharp enough? What will we do

with all the meat? How do I get it back to the village?” Today we

don’t hunt woolly creatures to survive but we do hunt in the jun￾gles of the corporate world. Businesspeople are daily asking the

same questions as they go into conferences, prepare reports, or hold

meetings with customers.

THE TWO MAJOR RESOURCES PROBLEMS

FACING PLANNERS TODAY

Two major resources problems face the planner today. One has to

do with people and the other with dwindling resources. First, there

is a shortage of people—good people, that is. You can always hire a

body to put into a position, but can you hire a quality person for

the specific job requirements? People who know this business will

tell you that to replace a lost employee costs between $18,000 and

$35,000 apiece. That is recruitment costs and doesn’t count lost

capacity as the job sits vacant for months. Multiply that times your

turnover rate to see what your annual recruiting is costing the

company. In conclusion, there are not enough good people to go

around and they are expensive to replace.

The business community has tried to put on a good face about

how it deals with its most valuable resource. To attract and retain

qualified people, many gimmicks have been tried. These range from

signing bonuses to sleight-of-hand name changes. Remember when

people who worked for a company were called employees? Now

they are associates. Historically humans were called personnel, now

they are human resources. I sometimes wonder if that shift didn’t

actually do more harm to the way people are managed. I’m not so

sure that the term human resources isn’t as depersonalizing as any

other. Attempts to personalize the individual may have been lost in

the activity itself.

Once in Vietnam, while watching a buffalo herder gathering

his thirty charges for the return to the village late in the afternoon,

our paths crossed and we stopped to exchange greetings. I asked if

the herd belonged to the village or the families. I was told that each

buffalo belonged to a family and was considered their most prized

possession. Then I asked if they were kept in a common corral at

The Resources Plan 269

night. “No,” the elder herdsman chuckled, and said he dropped

each animal off at each owner’s place. That puzzled me. I didn’t

know how he could do that because they all looked exactly the

same. When I asked how he knew which one went to which fami￾ly, he asked with a polite but embarrassed laugh, “Major, do you

have children?” I nodded. He continued, “Can you tell them

apart?” Point made.

Organizations want to treat employees as individuals but

instead view them as I did the buffalo—as one indistinguishable

herd. Employee satisfaction studies tell organizations it is impor￾tant to treat employees as people. Historically there have been

many humanistic movements to put the P back into personnel or

the human back into human resources management. Attempts to

have meaningful inclusion of employees in company management

tend to fail. Calling employees by any other title still means they

are employees. No one is fooled. Putting popcorn machines in the

break room is no substitute for changing ineffective core manage￾ment processes. A relaxed dress code doesn’t add to the employee

paycheck.

The second problem is the overall shortage of resources. Vast

quantities of resources once available are no long in such abundant

supply. Look at natural resources as examples. Timber, coal, and

water all have histories of abuse. Think of all the virgin timber that

has been cut in North America sometimes in slash-and-burn efforts

to clear land for farming and urban development. Think of how our

great rivers have been polluted in some cases to the edge of destruc￾tion. The Great Lakes in North America come to mind when we

think of how pollution has created dead bodies of water. Imagine

how shortsighted it was for the city of Toronto to dump its garbage

in Lake Ontario for years. Decades later the city is paying the price

to dredge the garbage out and handle it properly.

Management has also plundered natural resources of organiza￾tions. Consider what separates you from your competition. It’s not

money, because that has a limit. Neither is it technology or infor￾mation because everyone can acquire those. These resources have

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boundaries or finite limits. The one resource that has no bound￾aries, is unlimited in size, and is basically free for the asking is intel￾lectual capital. People’s brainpower is your only differentiation.

Ironically, companies are busy downsizing, giving away the very

resource that makes the difference.

Traditionally the American solution was to throw more effort

and resources at a problem until it was overwhelmed. That is a

brute-force solution in times of plenty. It works if you have unlim￾ited resources. What happens when you have a limited supply of

people, materials, and money? How do you still make your plan

work? Once a Canadian president asked me if I saw a difference

between Canadian executives and U.S. executives. The answer for

me was easy. Canadians seemed more thoughtful when approach￾ing a task. They ask what are they going to get for their effort.

Because they have limited resources, they cannot afford the luxury

of ready, fire, and aim.1 In the United States, executives tend to

expend resources like there is no limit. Of course I’m generalizing,

but it does seem to be a truism.

BUILDING YOUR RESOURCES PLAN: THE TEN

KEY ELEMENTS

Your resources plan should include documentation of what has to

be marshaled to support your operational and organizational plans.

One purpose of a taking a systemic look at resources is to glean

every edge you can develop to make your business plan fully oper￾ational. The company-level resources plan is developed in conjunc￾tion with the other parts of the business plan during the planning

conference. At least ten components are identified for the resources

plan:

1. Staffing levels

2. Information requirements

3. Facilities

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