Stunning view of the Americas on Earth Day

Today, April 22, 2014 is Earth Day, and what better way to celebrate than taking a look at our home planet from space.

NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this stunning view of the Americas on Earth Day, April 22, 2014 at 11:45 UTC/7:45 a.m. EDT. The data from GOES-East was made into an image by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

In North America, clouds associated with a cold front stretch from Montreal, Canada, south through the Tennessee Valley, and southwest to southern Texas bringing rain east of the front today. A low pressure area in the Pacific Northwest is expected to bring rainfall in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, stretching into the upper Midwest, according to NOAA's National Weather Service. That low is also expected to bring precipitation north into the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada. Another Pacific low is moving over southern Nevada and the National Weather Service expects rain from that system to fall in central California, Nevada, and northern Utah.

Near the equator, GOES imagery shows a line of pop up thunderstorms. Those thunderstorms are associated with the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The ITCZ encircles the Earth near the equator.

In South America, convective (rapidly rising air that condenses and forms clouds) thunderstorms pepper Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and northwestern and southeastern Brazil.

GOES satellites provide the kind of continuous monitoring necessary for intensive data analysis. Geostationary describes an orbit in which a satellite is always in the same position with respect to the rotating Earth. This allows GOES to hover continuously over one position on Earth's surface, appearing stationary. As a result, GOES provide a constant vigil for the atmospheric "triggers" for severe weather conditions such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms and hurricanes.

When Strategies Are Not Strategic

Modern business planning owes it origins to two very different parents.

The first is the obligation to prepare a "Prospectus" when floating a company, outlining the "prospects" of the new venture. Although an early prospectus has little in common with a modern business plan, it might well have contained elements that might find their way into such a plan - a statement of purpose, a "vision" of where the new company intends to be in a few years, an analysis of opportunities and threats, and so on.

A prospectus is primarily a legal and financial document, but it is also a marketing tool to sell the new company to investors. What it is not is a strategy.

The second major influence on business planning is military planning. Many of the early pioneers of business planning were professional soldiers or naval officers who were retired or who found themselves surplus to requirements between wars. They brought the techniques they had learned in the services into the world of commerce.

There is a saying to the effect that "When amateurs talk about war, they talk about strategy; when professionals talk about war, they talk about logistics."

There is much truth in that. The key to winning wars is less actual fighting than being able to move men and material at short notice and under pressure to the place where they are most needed. The army that does this most effectively will usually win the fighting.

Since professional soldiers devote a great deal of their time and thought to this, they tend to get good at it. Experience has taught them a few simple techniques that are usually very effective in practice. Although there are many famous logistical failures, they are famous because they are exceptional. This is the military efficiency that proved so useful in the private sector.

However, the downside of professional soldiers being good at logistics because they talk about the subject more than strategy is that they are not so good at strategy.

Career soldiers are not necessarily expert strategists. The skills that make them good at logistical detail rarely come with a view of the bigger picture. Experienced commanders have often made elementary strategic errors that even a well-informed amateur would have foreseen and avoided. Whatever one's view of the policies of the West in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one can deny that the implementation of those policies has been full of avoidable strategic errors.

Many of the fine military minds that influenced the development of business planning were characterised by the same combination of logistical skill and strategic blindness.

Here then is the great gap between the two sources of business planning: neither was particularly interested in actual strategy.

Those who could draft a good prospectus might be able to conjure up an enticing picture of how things could be, and those in the military tradition could deal with the nuts and bolts of running a business, but the problem of turning the pretty picture into the nuts and bolts was never addressed.

There were plans and plans but no real strategy.

This original problem has never quite been resolved. One sees it reflected in too many business plans today. They are big on the broad vision and sound on the operational details, but have no strategy to turn one into the other - which, one would have thought, was the whole point of a business plan in the first place!