within the organizational domain. During this time, I have educated nearly 70,0000 aspiring businessmen and women in the fundamentals and theories of management and leadership and how to put such knowledge into real-world practice. One concept that has been the focal point of my research and teaching involves the topic of self-leadership. Self-leadership is an empowerment process of leading yourself to overcome obstacles to your goals. In the same way that one needs to be self-leading to finish a grueling marathon, an organization must be self-leading in order to execute its plans in an efficient and effective manner. What drives self-leadership at all levels in an organization? The people within the organization of course—and those people must be involved in the planning occurring in an organization. Without a plan, an organization has no direction. Without a plan that involves employees at all levels of the company and thus encouraging self-leadership, an organization not only has no direction, but it has uncommitted employees that lack the passion and energy needed for success. As Dr. Laurie Buchanan once stated, “No involvement means no commitment—no exception.”
The planning system is where an organization defines and decides what it wants to accomplish and who will do the work to make the accomplishment happen. In a plethora of organizations, planning systems do not foster self-leadership. People are often drafted into a process that is disjointed, unorganized, manually tedious, and political. It is many times facilitated by different point solutions and legacy tools that don't speak the same language. Rather than debating the art of the possible for the business, teams often argue about the sources of data, assumptions, and drivers. The current planning system in numerous companies is a top-down, nonempowering drag on culture, morale, and organizational effectiveness. How is an organization able to leverage its planning system to overcome impending obstacles when the planning system is an obstacle itself? How is an organization going to remain competitive in the chaotic times of today? These questions suggest that in order to thrive, companies today need to think about planning in a different, innovative way—planning that encourages individuals to lead themselves and be part of the planning process. Connected Planning is a wonderful step in this direction.
In a Connected Planning environment, the answer to the question “what's possible?” comes from a much more democratic debate than what we are used to seeing, involving stakeholders at the top of the organization and the subject matter experts with boots on ground. This begins a cycle of collaboration and calibration that leads to new insights, enabling greater agility and resilience. In the words of a timeless proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Today's marketplace is fraught with stiff competition, pandemic, and increasingly uncertain geopolitical dynamics. Connected Planning provides the framework for leaders to adopt and implement an agile decision-making environment—an environment that encourages employees to lead themselves while driving the organization forward amidst the velocity and uncertainty of the market.
Christopher Neck, PhD
Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
October 2020
Foreword from the First Edition
I have been involved with what is now called Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) in one way or another my entire career, whether it was in financial reporting and analysis or formulating strategy for our global business. I am a strong proponent of closing the gap between high-level strategy and day-to-day decisions, and of completing the cycle from a decision to its effectiveness. All too often we devise great plans and set out to execute them and then get overcome by events or sidetracked without coming back to see how relevant our plans were or how effective our decisions are.
Current economic demands and competitive pressure now require that we pay more attention to this cycle of Strategy, Plan, Execute, Analyze, and Improve. We must be more flexible and adaptable and be able to react to changing market conditions and customer preferences. And we must have a new level of accountability at all levels of our organizations. And with more mature and advanced EPM tools and the vast amounts of data at our disposal, there is no reason we should not be using this to give us more insight into the business and make faster, better decisions.
At Hyatt, we use our EPM capabilities to optimize all of our resources in pursuit of our goal of becoming the most preferred brand in each customer segment that we serve, not just for our guests but also for our managers, associates, and investors. The general managers at our full-service owned and managed hotels have an average tenure of more than 21 years at Hyatt. They are supported by regional management teams that use information, planning, analytics, and what-if modeling to support our general managers in achieving their goals. EPM is one of the foundational elements of our success and helps us focus on our mission of providing authentic hospitality.
EPM is not just another management fad or another technology buzz- word. This is doing commonsense, fact-based management right. In this book, Ron Dimon shows us a way to think about EPM holistically and directly connects it to what's important in the business: sustainably delivering stakeholder value. The book provides a framework to hang your EPM roadmap onto, and helps you prioritize what's next on your journey to managing and improving performance. I wish you luck on that journey.
Gebhard Rainer, EVP and CFO
Hyatt Hotels Corporation
Chicago, IL
November 2012
PREFACE
This is the second edition of the book originally entitled Enterprise Performance Management Done Right published in 2012. Since that time, much has changed in the world of connecting strategy with improved performance: new, cloud-based, in-memory technologies have been adopted by the largest organizations in the world, more unstructured data and ways of handling it, and an even faster pace of business disruption and competition. Since the first edition was published, I've noticed more emphasis has been placed on the planning, modeling, and analytics components of Enterprise Performance Management, as organizations are eager to improve their ability to react quickly to changing markets and customers, changing competition, and changing employee needs. The desire to improve readiness for change as a core competency among my clients is driving more interest in planning processes and technologies.
What's changed in the second edition:
There is more emphasis on the debate and commit sections of the Enterprise Performance Management framework. I am using the term “connected planning” to emphasize that;
There is less emphasis on the statutory consolidation and reporting process, as the audience for this is limited to the Finance department, and Connected Planning appeals more to business managers and teams;
Chapters have been reordered to provide better flow of the Connected Planning process;
A new chapter on digital planning, and those new technologies that impact planning and forecasting, has been added;
As most planning systems are now cloud-based, or most organizations are moving to the cloud, the cloud architecture diagrams have been removed;
Whiteboard drawings have been updated and standardized by the steady hand of Meredith Dimon, Greenware Press Studios.
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is for CFOs, CIOs, their direct
