A One Page Solution To Fight Complex Plans

Today I read the article “Can you pass a CEO Test?” by Adam Bryant in his regular New York Times column “The Corner Office.” In this edition, Greg Brenneman, CEO of CCMP Capital, shares some brilliant tips on determining strategy and setting goals.

For me, this has always been a challenge. It’s easy to write a long business plan and create complex strategies. It’s much harder to make plans that are simple, and then to implement and execute them effectively.

At the latter I’ve often failed, guilty of providing those around me with way too much information. As Brenneman describes it in this passage:

“They give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, ‘What are the two or three things that really matter?’ And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back.”

To counter this, Brenneman shares some great (and practical) tips:

Ask “What are the two or three levers that, if pulled correctly, really turn this business?”
Take those levers and put them into a one page plan (he divides the page in quadrants: Market, Financial, Product, People).
If you can’t simply put what needs to be done on one page, you haven’t thought it through well enough.
Give the plan a simple name that’s easy to remember (e.g., Go Forward Plan, Fund the Future).
On the one page plan, have simple actions and goals that people can understand and remember.
Leave a voice mail or update for the team once a week (he does it on Fridays) reiterating what 1) we said we were going to do, 2) what we did, and 3) what we’re going to do next week.

It sounds so easy. But often in business (and life) making it simple is what’s hard. It requires deep thinking and discipline to work things through till the end and filter out all the noise.

Getting an entire plan on to one page is a great constraint that forces you to make this happen. It shows whether you have indeed managed to make things as simple as they should be, or if you need to go back to the drawing board.

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