Joe’s Journal

Planning is a critical step in management. In order for a company to survive crisis and to be successful it must establish goals, procedures, policies and rules that will lead them to success. A business must know where it want to be, how it is going to get there, and the wisdom and knowledge to get back on track when a crisis or problem derails progress toward an intended goal(s) . Planning improves a company’s action orientation, coordination, focus and flexibility. In this paper I will talk about one such company that survived multiple crises by effective planning.

In Forbes magazine April 23rd article, “Building the Infinite Internet” speaks about how Akamai Inc. not only survived the dot-com disaster and the murder of their founder but how they came back through effective planning and made a daring comeback and reinvented how digital data is transmitted over the internet.

Akamai only survived its loss of dot-com busted customers and the murder of their founder by effectively planning their future. They scaled back to almost nothing, endured loses and waited for the need of internet bandwidth to be in demand. This took Planning and foresight to see that in the future that they could fulfill this need to their customers. Akamai could of easily been a casualty of dot-com bust, they not only survived through effective planning, they waited for a need to develop and sprung into action to fulfill the need.