In the business world we certainly like to toss around choice words to express our ideas. I don’t think I’ve ever used the term “strategic planning” in my home or personal life. I can well imagine my wife’s stare of death (inherited from her two teacher parents) if I ever suggested that we “strategically plan our future.” I’d get the stare not for suggesting we plan but for using meaningless business-speak just to say, “Can we talk about what we want to do later in life?”

When I run into strategic planning, it’s usually attached to a decimal number of years. Perhaps you have 5-, 10-, or 15-year plans where you work. When we plan on serving new customers with new products in 10 years time, we can work back from that point and determine the steps needed to achieve these plans.

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