Chapter # 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_jWgzGjkrY&feature=related

Business planning is defined as an ongoing process of decision making that guides the firm both in the short term and the long term.  Netflix provides a unique example this.  You can see in the interview with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, that from the very beginning of this corporation that they had a business plan for the long term.  Their initial plan was to be a company that provided online streaming of movies.  But in 1997, the year that Netflix began, no one knew exactly where the internet would go or how fast it would progress. In order to grow as a company and develop a consumer base they invested all their capital in dvd rental.  The business plan is brillant; creating a consumer base in the millions by offering a known product, so that when the timing was right they shifted their product focus onto a new type of medium.  To have a business plan that required suspending the original goal for an unknown number of years and to have invested in a related market until technology caught up shows tremendous foresight by the companies founders.