Thursday 18th October

One of those catchy little business maxims is ‘Fail to plan, Plan to fail.’   Not an exact analogy, but the idea is that by failing to plan adequately you are in effect storing up disaster for yourself and you might as well have given up before you started.  It was fashionable a few years ago at business seminars, but in the real world there is only so much planning ahead you can do.  Having been involved in budget forecasting the hardest thing to predict is the level of your ongoing sales, and most costs follow on from those estimates.  Budgets are almost always wrong, and if correct it is by luck rather than planning.

One of the major differences between the world views of Communism and Capitalism is that the former depends on central planning, and the latter on the whims of the market.  And while it is true that central planning has failed spectacularly, so too has the market.  Maybe all human endeavour fails ultimately.  But when you look more closely, some planning does work; the Olympics were planned to death and yet they worked brilliantly well, just imagine if it had been left to the market with opportunism and the lowest common denominator winning out rather than excellence and hard work and yes, planning.

And look at our system where the market rules and factories are closed and thousands thrown out of work because the market price of something has fallen.  Just walk down any high street and see how many shops have changed hands in the last ten years, old expensive shop-fittings ripped out and thrown in skips and expensive new ones and new windows and false ceilings and lights installed, because the old firm can write it all off as a tax loss, and the new one can capitalize things over the length of the lease so it won’t affect the bottom line.  But what a waste of resources, even if in a way it does create more work elsewhere.  Why can we not create a system of sustainable industries that do not keep soaring and then crashing, which make steady profits that all in the enterprise can feel part of, rather than this ‘spiv’ economy where companies spring up and close, quick as a knife.  Or might that require a bit of planning.