No, 37Signals, Planning Is Not What You Think

http://timberry.bplans.com/2009/06/no-37signals-planning-is-not-what-you-think.html

by BerislavLopac • 17 years ago

61 44 17 years ago

timberry.bplans.com

tallanvor• 17 years ago

The 37Signals people do say some silly things. Who doesn't, though?

It's one thing to argue against trying to nail down all the details far in advance, but whether you're running a business, or even, as Tim suggests, heading out on a trip, you're going to need some sort of a plan.

davidw• 17 years ago

> Who doesn't, though?

Those who keep quiet? I suppose it's better to be loud and wrong and get noticed, though, than silent and invisible.

jimboyoungblood• 17 years ago

Sure, if you also think it's "better" to be the drunk obnoxious guy at the party.

uggedal• 17 years ago

Some of the best trips I've had did not include a plan. Order a plain ticket, jump on the plane, arrive at the destination, and take it from there.

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

Yeah, but the ticket had a destination, right? And you bought the ticket in advance, right? And you knew when to show up at the airport, right? You had your passport with, and had enough cash to cover your stay, and a return trip, right?

You did a lot more planning than you seem to think.

reidman• 17 years ago

This article, and the last paragraph in particular, strike me as another disingenuous snowball fight. Except with semantics instead of snowballs.

It seems pretty obvious that 37signals, when talking about 'plans', refers to the massive business plans which are the hallmark of people who don't have a chance of seeing them through.

But this is really just a debate between a guy who happens to sell business plans and a bunch of guys who happen to sell un-business-plans, soooo...

tjogin2• 17 years ago

That guy seems to be looking really close for things he can misunderstand or misconstrue in order to have a disagreement.

This is probably not the first time he's read something he "disagrees" with at 37signals. It reads like a lot of pent up frustration is finally being let loose.

dinkumthinkum• 17 years ago

I sort of agree that he is grasping here. However, I don't think it is very unusual to find many things to disagree with 37signals about.

BerislavLopac2• 17 years ago

"It seems pretty obvious that 37signals, when talking about 'plans', refers to the massive business plans which are the hallmark of people who don't have a chance of seeing them through."

If it's pretty obvious, I don't see it. From Matt's article I also gather that he sees any formal "plan", i.e. a set of steps and activities put together in advance, as something to restricting and necessary. Just as on the issue of bootstrapping vs. external funding the 37signals people seem too rigid in viewing their choices as being the best and only correct.

The quotes posted below describe the situation perfectly.

koepked• 17 years ago

But this is really just a debate between a guy who happens to sell business plans and a bunch of guys who happen to sell un-business-plans, soooo...

It's better than that, this is a debate between a guy who happens to sell the same business plan that 37Signals gives away:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1599181908/187-6998830-4936328?...

cubicle67• 17 years ago

It looks like you're right, and that it's the classic case of two people arguing about the same thing. Here's a quote from the book linked to above

" ... In The Plan-as-You-Go Business Plan, Tim Berry makes these points much more eloquently than I ever could. Tim argues that the planning process (along with regular reviews) is so important that business owners just need to get started somewhere, anywhere, and continue to build your plan as your needs change. This is 180 degrees different from the classical "big bang" approach to business planning where we work for months at a time developing a huge document before we ever get started working on the business."

jraines• 17 years ago

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower

BerislavLopac2• 17 years ago

I prefer this version:

'Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential' -- Winston Churchill

kjhughes• 17 years ago

"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week." -- George Patton

dpcan2• 17 years ago

37Signals writes the way they do exactly for this reason. So other people will retaliate and reference them. They make everyone else look like they are just playing catch-up with 37Signals which makes them a constant leader by default. You have to hand it to them for this bit of brilliance.

However, I don't doubt that they are "planning" on writing another post next week that looks at a common business practice from the completely opposite direction. Then a thousand bloggers will write about how wrong they are.

ludwig3• 17 years ago

Nicely deconstructed. They're definitely using SEO on a deeper level.

joshwa• 17 years ago

I think the term you're looking for is 'trolling'.

wmeredith2• 17 years ago

That's not SEO (Search Engine Optimization). That's SEM (Search Engine Marketing) aka link-building/trolling/link-baiting/viral marketing... whatever you want to call it, it's about putting compelling content on your site that gets passed along on its own merits attracting links.

SEO is done on-site and is a process of organizing your information architecture so it is search-engine-friendly, and then creating content that is relevant to your target market. That way you can get indexed for the terms you want, so that you appear on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) exposing you to your target market at their time of need.

Once that's done, SEM begins which is about attracting off site links that get you ranked high on those SERPs so you get traffic. (There's another side of SEM that's about PPC.)

SEO and SEM go hand-in-hand, but they are still two different things. (Not being snarky, just pointing something out. I'm an online marketer and client education is the biggest challenge of my field.)

tjogin2• 17 years ago

I'm certain they like the side-effect of getting links from both sides of whatever fence they put up this week, but it could just be a nice side-effect, rather than the goal.

I'm similar in the way that when I make an argument for something, I don't like to soften it up with various "but it depends on", "your mileage may vary", listing various other methods that might work better in other situations, and so on.

I also think it's refreshing to have people actually take a stand for something — whether I agree with it or not. I'm tired of bland semi-advice that's watered down to go over well with everybody.

edw519• 17 years ago

Their marketing is brilliant. Do the same thing many successful others have been doing for years, brand it, and spin the hell out of it. Imagine how successful they'd be with a good name.

embeddedradical• 17 years ago

sorry to burst your bubbles people, but i don't think this was intentional. i don't think this was some genius marketing strategy that 37signals came up with, although maybe it is working in their favor. it's just over-reaction to over-planning is all, a slip, and not brilliance. read the guy's twitter page, and blog, this post is nothing extraordinary, so either he is a genius writer who can break into marketing with ease and mimic casualness on a regular basis, is a generated persona entirely, or just happened to say the wrong thing and 37signals already was talked about all the time, and thus this.

I keep checking out 37signals products because people make a fuss about it, so it's working, except I can't see what anyone sees in them.

dpcan2• 17 years ago

They seem to over-react to most time-tested business practices, which is why I think it's all part of the plan. People know that they will look at things differently, and then advise that it's a good way of doing business with their only data being compiled from their internal successes.

axod• 17 years ago

>> "That messy planning stage that delays things and prevents you from getting real is, in large part, a waste of time."

Does anyone else find "getting real" a horrible horrible term that sounds like old people trying to be hip, and completely failing? Or is it just me?

webwright2• 17 years ago

Right up there with "lean startups" for me. Or the 5-whys. Or six-sigma.

tpinto• 17 years ago

I'm not even reading a post that starts with "37Signals, a great Web app for project management". That just shows that the guy doesn't even know what is he talking about.

ccc32• 17 years ago

The point that seems to completely elude 37signals is that not every industry operates the same way as web design and development. They've taken their very narrow range of experience and told us that it applies to all projects in every industry (he cites Denver International Airport and the Big Dig in his post). This is such an outlandish notion that it becomes difficult to take them seriously at all.

As an example, I work as a design engineer in the R&D wing of an automotive supplier. If we were to just start building products on a hunch, without any market research or project planning, we could easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more before we knew if we were headed in the right direction.

Ultimately planning is imperfect and comes at a cost (time and resources), but that needs to be compared to the cost of no planning at all. In the web app business the cost of trying a new idea may be next to nothing, so trial and error becomes the most expedient method. In my industry, we're aware that our plans are imperfect, but if they allow us to cut a few very expensive iterations out of the development process then they're worth it.

tptacek• 17 years ago

I don't think it "eludes" them so much as they simply don't care about the entrepreneurial needs of automotive suppliers.

ccc32• 17 years ago

I would have made the same assumption, except, as I mentioned, the two examples he gives are major construction projects. Since it was clear that the 37signals post was addressing all types of projects, I thought I'd give one example where the argument against planning doesn't hold.

rubinelli• 17 years ago

Isn't the automotive industry the MBA textbook example of how less planning, nimbler processes, continuous improvement, and faster innovation allowed underdogs to completely reverse the market?

Tamerlin2• 17 years ago

No, it's because they're constantly evaluating and updating their plan to adapt to obstacles rather than attempting to ignore obstacles and proceed obstinately along the same route that they had in mind at the beginning.

If anything they're doing MORE planning, because whenever something gets in their way, they have to put some effort into coming up with a new plan or changing their existing plan.

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

I'm appaled that the hate of 37signals around here runs so deep that people have actually downvoted the above comment.

datums• 17 years ago

37signals mentioned 14 times in this post, it worked. Lots of noise. Filter it.

No, 37Signals, Planning Is Not What You Think

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