How To Devise Your Business Strategy

It is widely accepted that after their defeat in World War II, the Japanese were the first to embrace the ideal of ‘business is war’. This means that business uses the ideas of the battlefield and applies them to the world of business.

And it certainly worked for Japan: today, Japan is a major or dominant power in almost every world strategic industry including finance, communications, mass-transit, semi-conductors, motor vehicles, and popular entertainment.

The world’s largest banks are all Japanese. The largest record company in America is Japanese, and two of the three biggest movie / entertainment companies in America are Japanese. Many big companies in the US like Loews Theatres, Firestone Tires and 7/11 stores are also Japanese. In fact, 7 of the 10 largest companies in the world are Japanese.

Furthermore, Japan today is the world’s biggest manufacturer of cars, having surpassed the United States in the mid 1980’s. These all used to be American dominated industries 25 years ago.

Believe it or not, this phenomenal success can be traced back to ancient China, in particular a great military general named Sun Tzu. It is reckoned that he lived from around 544 BC to 496 BC in the ancient state of Ch’i.

Sun Tzu wrote the earliest – and still the most revered – military strategy book in the world. This masterpiece is best known to most of us as ‘The Art of War’ and can be found on the shelves of most good bookshops. Since naming a written work after its author was customary in ancient China, the text was originally referred to as simply ‘Sun Tzu’.

Considering the countless texts lost or destroyed throughout China’s history, the remarkable survival and relevancy of Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ to this very day attest to its immeasurable value.

This fact was not lost on the Japanese. Sun Tzu was first introduced to Japan as early as 400 A.D. Japan’s leaders earnestly applied Sun Tzu to warfare: the samurai would peruse its contents before each battle. They were among the most diligent practitioners of the book’s concepts, and came up with their own term to encapsulate its meaning: Sonshi.

I’m sure your business would like to one day be the same size as your average keiretsu (almost all the significant companies in Japan are aligned into one of about 6 keiretsu or business ‘groupings’. These are loosely linked ‘super-corporations’ for lack of a better term. Most of the Japanese companies whose brands we know and love are in these keiretsus. Several of these keiretsus have been around a very long time (before WWII) dating back to feudal-like family-run trading houses. Mitsubishi and Mitsui are two of the more famous ones. Famous companies like Nissan, Toshiba, and Sumitomo Bank are all in keiretsus). If you want to win your own war, then you need to look at your business strategy.

The word ‘strategy’ is used a lot and when there is a particularly big problem, then organisations will say that they are drawing up a ‘detailed strategy’ in order to deal with it. In reality, however, strategies should never be detailed: a strategy should be simple, it’s the way that the objectives of the strategy are achieved – the tactics – that are usually the complicated and imaginative part.

Strategy is almost always long-term planning. It involves all those things which you’ll need to worry about for a long time. Formulating your strategy must have as its final goal your total and unquestionable ‘victory’. If not, then the strategy is incomplete.
With this ultimate goal in mind, you must ask yourself the question: “What stands in my way?”

From this, your plan should be simple and flexible enough to encompass most probable outcomes (possible alliances, definite enemies, highly contested and less contested territories, etc) and lead you to victory. This plan, in brief, is your strategy.