You don't create demand; you obey it
In this great Business 2.0 column titled tongue-in-cheek as Barely Managing, Thomas A. Stewart writes about how you can never be too sure when predicting a market demand.
The prophets of video-on-demand overlooked something about "demand" -- namely, whose demand it really is. You don't create demand; you obey it. You can lead demand to water, but you can't make it drink.
Demand wasn't always so demanding. When markets are cartelized (one phone company, three automakers) or regulated (mandated rail- and airfares, interest rates, brokerage commissions), supply has more sway...Plans are great, till they gang a-gley. In the 1970s and 1980s, the heyday of strategic planning, big companies put their best and brightest to work in enormous planning departments. Like generals who finally perfect a war plan at the same moment that new technology makes it obsolete, strategic planners rose just in time for the demise of the business environment that planning was designed for. Globalization, deregulation, and information and communications technologies have cracked cartels and broken up orderly markets -- the only company I can think of that's safe behind monopolistic walls is Microsoft (MSFT).
...When demand is running around loose, smart leaders don't make too many plans. Instead they make hypotheses, then adjustments. They plan only for the foreseeable future, much like a motorist who takes care not to drive so fast that he can't stop within the range of his headlights. For the rest -- for the future darkness toward which you are hurtling -- you set a goal, a destination; you measure progress toward that goal; and you arrange your investments and operations so that you can, with relatively little pain, adjust, change lanes, accelerate, brake, take an alternate route, honk, improvise, or compromise.