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Sounds Like a Plan
Rigorous, thorough analysis is the precursor of an effective business plan, right? Maybe not. In an interview about leadership in the New York Times (March 15, 2009), Greg Brenneman (MBA ’88), chairman of private-equity firm CCMP Capital, suggested that, for starters, simply stepping back, avoiding too much detail, and eschewing buzzwords might be a better way to go. He recalled that shortly after he and Gordon Bethune (AMP 111, 1992) took over Continental Airlines, “the first thing we did was we sat down at his dining room table, and I just had out a notepad and we started drinking wine, and we switched to Scotch, and we just started to endeavor to write down everything that was brain-dead about the airline.” The result was the one-page Go Forward Plan, with easy-to-understand guidelines, such as “The fastest way to make money is to stop doing things that lose it.” “And so,” Brenneman said, “we stopped flying to places that lost money.”
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