what do business plans matter

This may seem a strange question. Obviously, business plans matter – they are the manifestation of the company’s strategy, how else can you ensure the goals will be met.. and so on.
And yet, there is an equally strong current in the other direction: companies need to be nimble, respond quickly to opportunities, continuously rethink their ‘theory of business’, not wait for the annual planning cycle to address strategic issues, etc.

What are we to make of all this?

As usual, business plans do matter, but not for the reasons people think they matter.

As Eisenhower said, ‘Plans are nothing, planning is everything’. The process of planning is what brings the value, not the plan itself.

The process of planning brings all the major role holders in an organization together, on the same page, on a topic they all have to agree is important. This is not as trivial as it sounds.. there are actually very few topics the head of sales and the head of HR, for instance, would both agree, are equally important.
If properly done, it can force ‘undiscussables’ to bubble to the surface – should we really continue the India business? Should we close that backward-area manufacturing center now that there are no benefits?
It can force the business leaders to document the assumptions they are making about the world they do business in – the ‘theory of business’.. while this is probably the single greatest benefit of business planning, it is all too often completely lost in the maze of numbers and fog of reconciliation that always hangs over the planning exercise.
it can enthuse and inspire people by showing in a concrete way that ‘it can be done’ – once you put it down on paper (or spreadsheet, nowadays), it suddenly seems do-able.
Finally, and this is probably more critical for investment-intensive manufacturing businesses, it serves the very useful purpose of indicating how much investment needs to be made, and when.

If you want to make business planning really useful, I would offer two suggestions:

Do NOT create a high-powered strategic planning team. The plan needs to be put together by the people who have to implement it. It is time to erase the distinction between ‘planners’ and ‘doers’. The two have to be the same. If you have a head of planning, let him/her be a mid-level executive, capable of ‘cleaning up’ after the messy business of planning, arranging reviews, and so on, rather than some great strategic thinker who ‘drives’ the plan. That is what the CEO is for.
Spend at least 30% of the time on ‘scenarios’. Scenarios are not ‘high/medium/low’ or ‘optimistic/pessimistic/normal’. A scenario is built by identifying the small number of forces in the business environment which can massively impact your business – customer tastes, regulation, price of oil, political stability in the Middle East, whatever it is. Take extreme values of each of these, and plot a coherent story about what the world will look like if that ‘scenario’ unfolds. Yes, there are potentially n x m scenarios, if n is the number of factors, and m the number of outcomes for each, but it is enough to limit oneself to, say, 3 of these not necessarily the most likely ones but the most extreme ones). Thinking through each of these scenarios does two things for you: it enables you to actually react if the dreaded scenario really happens (as BP did when oil prices soared); secondly, it helps you understand your business model better. The ‘planner’ should then spend the year monitoring the critical factors that define the scenarios, and alert the organization to which scenario is actually unfolding.

I always say that strategy is a dialogue with the environment. Then business planning can be a good tool for dialogue, nothing more and nothing less!