When was the last time you told your mobile service provider that you love them or the maker of your cell phone?

There is nothing a company wants more than to cultivate a love affair with customers. Now what’s wrong with that sentence? Well nothing really, besides the fact that its usually a LIE, and a pretty brazen one at that.

Sadly, most corporations only preach this without actually practicing it. They prefer to behave like detached creatures that loathe closeness and recoil at the slightest twinge of customer affection. They prefer “customer adoption” and “customer retention” to customer affection. They shrink back from the warm embrace of their most ardent fans.

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The business plan is sorely in need of reinvention. Much like fortune telling, it continues to be an elaborate, ritualistic and time-honored exercise in pre-cognition. The whole thing is about as reliable as a stock tip overheard at a racetrack.

It’s such a meaningless exercise in terms of the depth bankers and investors want from these plans. There’s no crystal ball to assure the future, but they want you to make it look that way. Not to say that there is no value to a business plan, because that would be overstating the case. A business plan is a good exercise in strategic planning that is useful in bringing considerations to the forefront, which might otherwise become nasty future surprises.

However, it’s definitely high time that we had second-generation business plans, business plan 2.0 if you will. Above all, the most important thing is Read more »