Where do you see yourself in five years? It is a common question in American job interviews. An article reposted by Villanova University’s career center quotes a career coach: interviewers “want to understand your ambition and see if you have a clear career path in mind.”
The answer does not have to be a detailed plan. A good answer gives a direction.
The Long Now Foundation, based in San Francisco, was founded on January 4, 1996. Its founders include Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Brian Eno. It is building a clock in Van Horn, Texas, that is meant to run for ten thousand years with minimal human intervention. The foundation writes years with five digits, such as 02026.
Its aim is to promote “slower/better” thinking as a counterpoint to “faster/cheaper.”
As general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, Sam Hinkie traded away the team’s most valuable players for high picks in the NBA draft, and the team lost in the meantime. The plan became known as the Process, and “Trust the Process” became the fans’ slogan. In the 2015–16 season the 76ers won 10 games and lost 72.
After a 1–21 start that season, the team brought in Jerry Colangelo as chairman of basketball operations. Hinkie stepped down on April 6, 2016, before the team had a winning season.
The Knot, the American wedding-planning site, advises couples to send save-the-date cards “six to eight months ahead of the ceremony.” “At the very earliest, try to keep it to under a year.” Less than four months before the wedding “is considered too late.”
In October 2015, Elon Musk said that Tesla would have a car capable of full autonomy “in about three years, maybe a bit sooner.” In December 2015 he said “approximately two years.” In April 2019 he said: “I feel very confident predicting that there will be autonomous robotaxis from Tesla next year.”
Reuters later wrote: “Musk for years has failed to deliver on promises that self-driving Teslas are just around the corner.”
The studio 3D Realms announced the video game Duke Nukem Forever on April 27, 1997. For years its standard answer to the question of when the game would ship was “when it’s done.” Wired News gave it its Vaporware Award several times. The game was released in June 2011, more than 14 years later.
On November 14, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told a defense conference: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” He said he had heard it “long ago in the Army.” His reason: “the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”
Another version, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable,” appears in Richard Nixon’s book Six Crises (1962). Nixon was paraphrasing Eisenhower.
Usually each winter, the Congressional Budget Office publishes budget projections for the next ten years, and it generally updates them in August. The ten-year period is the one used in the congressional budget process. CBO states that the projections “are not predictions of budgetary or economic outcomes.” It also reports on how accurate its past projections were.
The GPRA Modernization Act, signed on January 4, 2011, sets the planning calendar of federal agencies. Each agency’s strategic plan must cover at least four years. “As needed, the head of the agency may make adjustments to the strategic plan.”
Each agency also publishes a performance plan every year. Progress on the priority goals is reviewed “not less than quarterly.”
John Doerr learned objectives and key results, or OKRs, as an engineer at Intel under Andy Grove in the 1970s. In the fall of 1999 he introduced them to the founders of Google, a start-up he had just funded. His book on the method, Measure What Matters, was published in 2018. OKRs are typically set for a quarter and reviewed often.