There are some critical issues to consider when building your business plan and constructing the accompanying story. Stories fail when these issues become traps or pitfalls. This chapter presents the issues and offers concrete examples of how to avoid the pitfalls. These issues have to do with are how management theories shape your business behavior, your attitude toward planning, the effects of time on your story, guidance from which you build a business plan, and assumptions you make to construct a successful plan
You must meet and deal with all five considerations for a successful story. The absence of any one piece creates a hole in the planning model and makes your story incongruent.
The example issue is your understanding of the roots of our business models. As managers and leaders, we have centuries of business thinking embedded into our psyches. That thinking is based on a model now considered obsolete or at least under suspicion. A completely new way of viewing the world has opened our thinking about the leadership of people and the management of companies. In a nutshell, every business model we know is up for review. Concepts once held dear, like the span of control of five to seven people, are now being questioned. The traditional chain of command is being replaced with other ways of thinking. Rigid organizational structures, once thought to be permanent, are being replaced with evolving structures of a fluid nature. It is a confusing time for those managers who mastered the principles of one type of management only to find it being replaced at the height of their careers by another school of thought.