For the past seven weeks, we have discussed people and building talent in your business. Now that a great team of A-Players has been assembled, it is time to transform the business. The team’s first task is to develop plans, both short-term and long-term, to align the organization to a common direction and set expectations on performance. It is impossible for the team to hit the company goals if everyone does not know the goals.

Short-term plans provide a road map for daily management and incremental improvement of the business to ensure maintaining a solid foundation. Long-term plans provide a path for the business to utilize breakthrough thinking to drive aggressive, profitable growth on top of the solid foundation. In this volume, the focus is on short-term planning. The short-term plan covers the next annual fiscal calendar period and sometimes is referred to as the Annual Operating Plan or AOP.