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Burn your business plan
One of the first things you are told in business is to produce a business plan. Banks love ’em. It’s hardly surprising; if you’re asking them to take a bet on you – they want to know you’ve thought it through.
But believing that the next three years, let alone six months, can somehow be ordained by writing it down on a piece of paper is a fallacy best left to clairvoyants.
Instead you have to become a black belt in Miuayga, or ‘Make it up as you go along’.
As Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder observed, ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ However, this wasn’t a blanket rejection of planning. Indeed von Moltke was an eminent strategist. But he recognised that only the beginning of a campaign ...
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