My mother-in-law gave me a copy of the Forbes 400 (wonder if she is trying to tell me something?)

While I don’t think it’s generally a good use of time to read the bios (they don’t tell you much about HOW they made their money, just ‘Investments” or “oil,” etc.), I did find a nice set of quotes at the end that were inspirational.

One of them jumped out at me, William Hewlett from Hewlett-Packard who said:

“We didn’t have any plans when we started. We were just opportunistic.”

Given my ongoing series of blog posts about the need to change the way that marketing planning is done (starts here) and yesterday’s piece on “Rapid Marketing Development,” which perhaps I should just call “Entrepreneurial Marketing,” it rang a bell.

What Hewlett and other entrepreneurs know is that, most of the time, your original idea is not the one with which you end up.

You see the opportunity and you can only figure out the best way to address it via prototyping, rapid testing, rapid failure, and iteration.

It just dawned on me that maybe the delineation is not between planning and not planning, rather it’s between Planning and Preparation?

When I was younger, I lived in Europe and Asia for 3 years. I backpacked/hosteled a lot.

I would know my general destination and I would have a rough idea of how I would get there, but I didn’t plan out every single element. Didn’t know where I would sleep, eat, or find some interesting attraction.

However, I was almost ALWAYS prepared. Clothes, water bottle (a trait I still have to this day), basic first aid, Swiss Army Knife, etc.

In that way, I could pursue my own “commander’s intent” (i.e. Experience Europe/Asia in a full, meaningful way) without being overly committed to a plan (take the train from Strasbourg to Paris) which could be disrupted (as it was by yet another national strike in France) and thus, was well prepared to adjust as necessary.

So, does that make sense? Marketing preparation vs. marketing planning?