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Saturday, March 18, 2006
Batuhan: A single step
By Allan S. B. Batuhan
Foreign Exchange
One of the late Chairman Mao’s favorite phrases comes from the philosopher Lao Tzu, who stated that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Mao was obviously in search of a motto to cheer his tired and weary peasant soldiers so that they would find the will to overcome the mighty forces of the Kuomintang that were arrayed against them.
In the beginning, of course, Mao’s People’s Liberation Army was a ragtag collection of agrarian folk, many of whom he recruited without military experience. Most of them had never seen a gun, let alone fired one in anger, or at least in training.
Hence the choice of inspirational verse was apt. In Mao’s case, he needed a metaphor for breaking down a very long process into a series of discrete steps, so that his people were able to celebrate their small successes along the way, and were thus motivated to strive for the achievement of succeeding objectives leading to the final victory.
The successful execution of corporate strategy is no different from winning a people’s revolution. It is a long and arduous process and requires both dogged determination and passionate commitment on the part of an organization.
It is, therefore, important that like the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), members of an organization need a motto that would motivate them to work for the long term – something that would describe how their long journey depends on the successful execution of correct strategic choices that would lead to their dominance in their chosen market or industry.
Small wonder that many corporate leaders have paraphrased Chairman Mao’s favorite quote for this purpose. For them, making their “troops” realize that winning the war depends on successfully fighting an endless series of small battles and skirmishes is the key to achieving the ultimate victory.
And yet, inspirational as Lao Tzu’s quote was for Chairman Mao, what many business leaders fail to realize is that interpreted the wrong way, it can have undesirable consequences.
In the case of the PLA, their vision for the long term was clear — freedom for the whole of China from the ruling Kuomintang.
This was their “true north” that kept them going in the right direction, as they took their series of single steps towards their thousand-mile journey.
In many organizations, this “true north” is not well-defined at the outset. More often than not, the long-term goal changes with each passing year and there is never really a proper “fix” on what this direction should be.
This dominant corporate thinking is what I like to call “incrementalism,” in which the road to the long-term future gets constantly extrapolated with what is possible in the near term.
Many organizations will be hesitant to admit that this is how they plan their future, preferring to think of themselves as goal-oriented and with a clear vision of their future. And yet I would challenge most managers to look back into the many iterations of their strategic plans and long-term forecasts over the years, and see if they can honestly say to themselves that their future plans were not, in some way, just an extrapolation of their present realities.
True, some are more sophisticated in their self deception than others. Five years or so down the line they would set their sights on where they would like to be. But in their next year’s immediate plan, they would only build on that which is incrementally achievable from current performance.
The result is a great disconnection between their journey of a thousand miles and the direction in which they make their first step towards it.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 18, 2006 issue)
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