One of my favorite cousins, Mike Murphy, teases bartenders by saying “I’m searching for the second best martini in America.”
When they take the bait, they ask, “Why the second best; why not ask for the best?”
To which he responds, “Because if I find the best, then my search is over. What fun is that?”
If you’ve read this column before, you know how much I value planning.
My ad agency mentor Jim Johnson taught me that “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there” early on so carefully researched written plans precede any venture. And I continue to stress the case for written planning with every organization I work with.
Without a plan, you’ve no basis to allocate your resources and no way to measure your progress.
But I’ve learned there is a higher platform than planning. Let’s call it “searching.”
Our foundation has worked with great planners and great doers these last fourteen years. The “best of the best” are searchers.
William Easterly’s seminal book, “The White Man’s Burden” (reviewed February, 2009) led me to appreciate this term. [more]
He uses it to explain why the West has spent $2.3 trillion over the last fifty years in foreign aid yet only a small portion of that huge investment has been effective.
Easterly’s primary finding is that our approach has been to plan, based on our own research and perceptions rather than to (instead) search for solutions with our third world partners. In essence, he’s saying planning is not enough.
The ideas contained in this book are provocative and quite actionable. This quote reflects Easterly’s most fundamental thought that searching is a necessary move beyond planning.
"A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors.
A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions.”
Easterly cites a case in Africa many years ago when a well-intentioned agency sent $5 million of mosquito nets to an African government only to have many of the nets find their way onto the black market to be re-sold and used for such things as wedding veils. The solution to this type of debacle: begin on the ground searching with locals for the right distribution network BEFORE we buy the nets.
Thankfully, my problems with building a successful business and foundation are much simpler.
In 1988, we started a marketing consultancy, Contract Marketing, that was remarkably different from (the same business) we sold as an advertising company, WorkPlace Media in 2007.
For every one of those 19 years, we searched and modified our plans accordingly to changing markets and opportunities. It worked.
Since 1997, we’ve changed our original foundation, Free Hand, to reflect markets and opportunities and we are now working our way to a scalable platform for our non-profit investments. In our 2012 plan, that looks like the “Nonprofit Navigator” but who knows? I only know that we are getting closer to scalability every year.
Plans have a beginning and end – searches do not.
Even the best plans I’ve ever written required lots of adjustments.
This week, I presented a plan for a new business called Entrepreneurs’ Capital to my peer group. My friend, Jake Crocker, and I have been developing the idea for about two years and still haven’t launched it. Why? Because we view our current work as starting the search for a great business that will fill a market need for lending to entrepreneurs the banks seem to be abandoning.
My peer group’s response was that we still have a lot of holes in our plan. So, Jake and I are “repairing” it this week. And we realize that we’ll be adjusting the plan for as long as the business exists.
That’s just what searching is, a life-long venture for me, both personally and professionally.
Take a look at what your plan is. Are you just planning or are you also searching?
My wish for you is the earnings from the hard work of planning and the joy from the endless search.
Tim McCarthy
