Post courtesy of Freelance MD, a nonclinical physician careers community offering physician resources like nonclinical jobs and offering information that allows physicians more control of their career, income and lifestyle, from medical spas to real estate investing…

Strategic Plans Are Just Like Treating Patients Clinically…

Recommend remedy and then judge if works.

Laryngopharyngeal reflux is really a controversial entity. Patients complain of hoarseness, throat clearing, globus symptoms,cough and a sore throat. Some have coexistent signs of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), some don’t. Some have abnormal physical findings on laryngeal examination, some don’t. Most doctors treat such patients clinically with proton- pump inhibitors for several weeks to discover if things improve. We doctors think of it as treating someone within a clinical basis or treating clinically. Businesses call it a business plan.

When treating someone clinically, you are never sure process will continue to work and are all set to reconsider the verification in addition to the underlying assumptions you made when you made the verification and recommended treatment. Likewise whenever you write a strategic business plan, you are not sure the plan is appropriate and should prepare yourself to make frequent adjustments…progressing to Plan B.

John Mullins, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, and Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers , explain all this of their book, “Getting to Plan B”.

The fundamental thesis is that no battle plan. or strategic business plan, survives the very first shot and you simply has to be willing to make changes quickly. Exactly like you monitor patients for response to treatment, you monitor your company to observe if things are working. When they are not, then make changes.

Mullins and Komisar recommend using dashboards to evaluate your business. The numbers will explain whether your leaps of faith, beliefs you hold with regard to the answers to all your questions despite having no real evidence that these beliefs are in reality true, are valid or not.

In addition to that, just like you use history, physical exam and testing to monitor a patient’s progress, you may use metrics and dashboards to monitor the vital signs of your company. Those vital signs are your revenue model, your gross margin model, your operating model, your working capital model as well as your investment model.

You can actually depend on the fingers of just one hand the variety of businesses that have succeeded based upon Plan A. None of them are mine. Be made ready to monitor your business’s clinical progress, challenge your initial diagnosis, and, when the patient isn’t giving answers to treatment , improve your therapy before things go terribly south.