Welcome to PlanningSkills.COM

This website focuses on a wide variety of topics related to organization and individual planning situations. The primary focus is business planning.

Planning is an anticipatory decision making process that involves situation analysis, forecasting outcomes and events, evaluating alternative courses of action, anticipating consequences and considering implementation issues and contingencies. Planning often begins with asking one or more questions, for example: What if ...? Could we ...? Do we ...? Is it possible...? How should we respond ...? How can we ...? Is it feasible to ...?

In general, planning is a proactive process that is intended to help individuals, groups and organizations achieve performance objectives.

Featured Glossary Term

An industry is a group of companies or organizations providing similar products and/or services to an identifiable set of customers or clients.

An industry is a grouping of firms at a particular stage or level in a marketing channel. An industry is composed of firms on only one side of a market, buyer or seller. The firms in a specific industry are rivals and competitive relationships exist among them.

An industry is the most detailed category available in the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) to describe business activities. NAICS provides hundreds of separate industry categories, unique categories that reflect different methods used to produce goods and services. Statistical agencies use industry categories to classify, collect, process, publish, and analyze business statistics. Concerns primarily engaged in the same kind of economic activity are classified in the same industry regardless of their types of ownership (such as sole proprietorship, partnership or corporation).

A basic category of business activity. The term industry is sometimes used to describe a specific business activity (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing) or a more generic business activity (e.g. production of consumer durables). If a company participates in multiple business activities, it is usually considered to be in the industry in which most of its revenues are derived.

Featured Planning Tip

Please recognize that serendipity can impact the development and implementation of plans. Serendipity is a natural ability to gain knowledge and make useful discoveries from accidental events and occurences. Some equate it with intuition, others focus on awareness and pattern recognition. Pronounced "sehr-uhn-DIP-uh-tee", this tip may seem foreign to systematic planning, but it is not. Rather serendipity is the fortuitous result of planning and of being prepared. Serendipity is a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise".

The word serendipity has its roots in "The Three Princes of Serendip", a Persian story about three princes who had the knack of discovering things quite by chance. The word was first used by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann in 1754.

This tip is closely linked to the tip exploit favorable circumstances and the tip exploit the "fog of war".

"War is the province of chance. In no other sphere of human activity must such a margin be left for this intruder. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance and deranges the course of events." - Karl von Clausewitz

"The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself." - General Douglas MacArthur

According to scientist Louis Pasteur, "Chance favors the prepared mind."