Business and war are fundamentally different, but there are some similarities. Competition in both is fierce. In business, it is usually constrained by the demands of “a fairer society” embodied in law and agreed business practice. The same should be true of war but a combination of new fighting tools, the widespread use of fake news media and unscrupulous antagonists makes it difficult to keep the criteria updated and virtually impossible to monitor. There is, however, one aspect of both situations that remains vital if you are to succeed at either. That is planning.

Planning ahead

People widely have a poor view of planning, especially in times of emergency. This may be partly because they see the process of planning as something you do for a posh wedding, where everything must be tickety-boo and there is no room for mishap. Ask those who professionally plan weddings. They will tell you it isn’t like that at all. All weddings, however posh, are full of things that were not supposed to happen - a good preparation for marriage, perhaps. The point is: How much worse would they have been without planning?

Great generals have said this down the ages. If you don’t plan you will lose, notwithstanding that your plan will never work out exactly as you had intended. So planning is not, as some seem to think, deciding a course or courses of action which if followed will ensure success. Needless to say, success is the objective but, given the ups and downs of life, a plan is more to provide options depending on the situation that exists at any one time.

Failure to plan = planning for failure

The launch of Cerebos Pacific Ltd in 1981 was a reasonable illustration. My parent company’s intention was for me to sell the few tiny businesses we had in Asia so that they could put any money thus realised towards the acquisition of businesses in the USA. The amount they specified for me to bring back to them was S$1 million .

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Once on the ground I saw that the businesses were either of no practical value at all or were potentially extremely profitable. Which of these depended mainly on our ability to prove the claims we were making for one product - Brand’s Essence of Chicken. The claims had been made originally, almost two hundred years earlier, when no proof was required and advertising was largely uncontrolled. By the 1970s, that was changing. Scientific evidence of efficacy was demanded by both government and consumer. Without it the product was likely to wither and die in a relatively short time. So, against the advice of many colleagues, I insisted on a scientific test carried out by Western standards and a Western country. The consequence of not doing so was clear - disaster. The consequence of doing so was much less predictable.

I was fortunate that the results were positive and proved the claims we were making for the product. When we came to sell eleven years later, my parent company received 825 times what they had asked for. Where was the planning in that? It was, very simply, to say that we needed an answer to the question: “What is this business worth?” The risk of exposing relative worthlessness if the tests had proved there was no real benefit in the product was only a risk to the extent of S$1 million. The opportunity attached to that risk was - as it turned out - many times that.

Which part of the planning ensured that? Treating the product as a launch, is the answer. Had we treated the product as one to be developed with minimum risk and as straightforwardly as possible we would have sold the businesses, but for a very low price. My astute boss agreed with me when I said “let’s treat the product as heading for an IPO”. That way we will see its value quickly and dramatically - one way or the other. By converting the plan from sale to IPO, how we set about handling them was totally changed.

The elements leading to this were simple. The objective, with which incidentally I disagreed, was to sell the Asian businesses. I thought my parent company would handle business development better in Asia than in the United States of which we had very little knowledge. The original plan was seen, by many of my colleagues, as merely hawking them around until we got an offer. The plan as conceived by my chairman and myself was to aim for an IPO. Once we had agreed this, the more detailed parts of the plan fell naturally into place.

Keep it simple

Most plans - even those for complicated developments - must be able to be expressed reasonably simply. Once you have a clear objective, you can structure the plan - not in too much detail. Circumstances change - usually to make life more difficult, not easier. Today many circumstances are changing all the time and at breakneck speed. Very difficult to see where the world economy is going when the concept of borrowing has gotten out of hand and is retaliating by inflating money to worthlessness. Where only five years ago we were apparently heading for an era of cooperation, called globalisation, now we are dividing the human race into groups who believe in different social ideologies. Forecasting in such VUCA times is extremely difficult.

There are certain trends we can rely on to determine how the course of events may change. The greatest of these is of course climate. It is also one change that people palpably don’t subscribe to until they see the devastating effects of it. More than half the planet does see this now and the perception is likely soon to mobilise individuals, not just governments. Personal ambitions have changed since the start of the epidemic. They may change again as it becomes endemic. For the moment, people think the long-term is impossible to predict and maybe even unlikely to exist. A personal ambition to enjoy life has taken over from the former guilt of any self-indulgence.

With great power comes great responsibility

Greater business cooperation will substitute, where it can, for increasing ideological disparity. There are risks for the consumer in such a situation as epitomised by the current energy virtual monopoly. But business may be just as good a form of governance as elected (or non-elected) members of a congress. It is certain that, whatever the attempted controls on business being involved in politics, trade and commerce will drive the world substantially more than it has done in the past. This is especially true if business, and the investors who make it possible, accept their responsibility for sustaining the planet and for a fairer distribution of what constitutes a good life.

Business needs are the best innovation drivers and successful business is the best source of available investment for developments. However, business has to change its original definition of capitalism to allow governance not previously associated with commerce. This is relatively easily done by big companies, provided the shareholders are responsible people. It is much more difficult for small and medium businesses to achieve such standards, which is why sensible governments are encouraging the amalgamation of such companies.

All these last points are about objectives, not plans. They are made to ensure that primary attention now needed is understood to be the objective. The plan is the map of possible ways to get there. It requires imagination and creativity. Human beings have plenty of that if they will direct it correctly.

The writer is founder and chair at Terrific Mentors International