“Battles are won or lost before they are fought.”–Sun Tzu
Last week I received a phone call from a longtime reader that
is out of work and asked me if I knew of anything (we keep both formal and informal
lists of readers looking for fellow hard hitters). As a rule I'm sympathetic to
involuntary unemployment since I know what it can do to a family. So I listened.
A moment later I connected the name to the news and I tightened up. Although it
was announced he had "resigned for personal reasons" everybody knows he
was fired because of the poor performance of his company. I asked him what happened.
He very articulately explained what I already knew because it had been given a lot
of coverage in the financial press. I also looked up the stock price while he was
on the phone—it was all right there. He described
how every time they (the company) went into a new market they were trounced, or
nearly trounced, by the incumbent. "Suddenly they would deploy all these resources
we had no clue they had. Nobody knew." Huh? I mean seriously…what?
Please. This guy deserved to be fired. If he was a military general
in the battlefield, rather than a civilian one hiding away in his corner office,
sons and daughters would be gone. A lot of them. I couldn’t get off the phone fast
enough. A weak whiner. No wonder his company’s expensive efforts were so easy to
defeat. All that equity holder value wasted. Poof!
Never forget: "Battles are won or lost before they are fought."
Although it came from Sun Tzu a very long time ago there is absolutely nothing mysterious
and illusive about this. The reader’s comment about "Nobody knew" is just
plain lame—a genuinely ludicrous excuse for egregiously poor chief-level performance.
Everybody in the other companies knew what was available to deploy against a new
manufacturer entering their market spaces. The defeated guy on the phone was surprised
when he should have been prepared for marketplace battle. His idea of being prepared
for the worst, was expecting the best, and that’s what he provisioned for. And this
happened to his company more than once! He should have been fired 8 years ago. I’m
embarrassed the guy is a reader of this newsletter. It makes me feel like I’ve somehow
failed.
Remember, the outcome is always decided before the clash. Business.
War. Parenting. It’s all the same, folks. Only the stakes are different.
And this works all the way down through your company. Everybody
in your company, including those in your department, should think like a good soldier.
Always ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen within the timeframe relevant
to your job scope. The shipping clerk’s horizon is different than the CEO’s but
The Magic Question is the same: "What can go dreadfully wrong and what have
I done to prepare myself, and my team, for it?"
That’s only one part of earning your paycheck and supporting
your equity holders, but it’s a vitally important one.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”- Sun Tzu
Think about it...
