While
mastering Sun Tzu's The Art of War helps create very inventive plans,
linear planning is not Sun Tzu's focus. Sun Tzu saw that the competitive
challenge was beyond the realm of planning. While planning was necessary, the
much rarer skill, in his era and our own, was good decision-making under
pressure in situations that can not be predicted.
Planning and linear thinking follows a series of steps to produce a well-defined
result.
Planning
within controlled environments is not
only useful but necessary.
It would be nice to think that every event can be planned, but
in our fast-changing competitive world, many
critical events fall outside our control.
Real strategic understanding starts with the
humble acceptance that the world is
outside our control. In this environment, most of our key
decisions are not planned. We have to make decisions that recognize what is
changing in our situations and are appropriate to changing
conditions.
Sun Tzu saw
that losers clung to their
plans like an excuse while winners responded to the dynamics of their situation. Instead of a series
of pre-planned steps, we develop a perspective
that allows us to respond to competitive situations. While
These three areas of study are called position awareness, opportunity development, and situation response.
Both strategic planning and
adaptive strategy are necessary. Together, they create the resources and need for each
other. The control of advanced planning and the competitive adjustments from
daily
strategic decisions
both require human creativity, but they require different methods to apply that
creativity. The problem is that our knowledge of planned production has overshadowed
our understanding of competitive strategy.
