As we enter the normal stategic and business planning season it is clear that things are different this cycle. We are all being forced to ask tough questions about how we’ll invest, carefully, for 2010. I’ve been in several strategic planning sessions with both clients and in our own company where a single question is disturbing the status quo. The question boils down to asking, “is our current business model and approach over-engineered and over-built…and if so, how do we get it right for the coming years?” There is a fantastic Wired Magazine article you can use to spark the right conversation within your team that will help you target investments in the right areas.

For a long run with the expanding economy, there was an underlying assumption that none of us seemed to question, and that was that good should always be driven to great. However, there is a cost to making everything great, everything world-class, everything super-engineered for excellence. This also tied to a trend where innovation meant bigger, faster, more features and, of course, a price premium for having the best and latest.

This last week I was meeting with a person from Cisco about a tool we are developing that can track business trends and customer interest in companies, brands, products and preferences in real time. It turns the excercise that used to take a team of strategy analysts 2-3 months to complete as a one-time exercise that might cost $100K to $250K as a consulting project into a real-time system. Of cousre it would never replace the knowledge, creativity, experience and judgment of senior strategists and operating executives to make the final decisions. But, it would turn a very expensive, manual process, into a system solution that is good enough to generate the insights that are needed for executive decision making.

The person from Cisco pointed me to an article from Wired Magazine that really captures the essence of our thinking behind this new market monitoring system, which may not be as perfect in appearance as a PowerPoint deck scrubbed by a team of well trained undergrads and MBAs from top universities, but as a trade-off, it will be available in real-time, always up to date, based on the same oveall strategic thinking disciplines and structure, and will cost a lot less. That’s what Wired describes as a Good Enough winner.

It is always tough to think that things you spent so much time on perfecting may not be valued going forward, but that is sometimes how progress works. The Wired article does a great job of describing this trend in legal services, unmanned aircraft, video cameras, and healthcare. They discuss the trend towards innovation being applied to get to simpler, lower cost and better solutions for customers.

We very likley are at a point where many industries are overbuilt and overengineered on things that customers don’t care about enough to pay for anymore. As you enter this year’s strategic planning process, take an extra moment to prehaps have your team read this article and think about how the “good enough” may apply as a screen for how you build your strategy, investment and budget plans for 2010. And to be clear, “good enough” doesn’t mean to do a mediocre job, it means understanding what your customers really need the most and focusing innovation on how to do that better, faster, cheaper…and simpler than before. To me, the watchword for strategic planning in 2010 should be “simplify.” Good luck in rallying your team to this cause. I’m sure I’ll need it as well as we stir things up in our planning as well.

Michael Kanazawa is Chief Executive of Bedrock Dissero and co-author of Big Ideas to Big Results.

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