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It is possible that I may end up eating my words on this, and News Corporation shareholders eating their losses, but it is exactly the willingness to take risks based on a broad vision for the future, in spite of some ambiguity in the present, that the most successful leaders nurture in their executive teams. And you will need to embrace the same openness to risk in your career as well.

For another Aussie gone global example consider the Lonely Planet travel guidebooks. In 1973, after meeting on a park bench in Regent's Park, London, and later getting married, Maureen and Tony Wheeler spent their honeymoon travelling overland across Europe and Asia to settle in Australia. They weren't planning on writing a travel book, but when they told friends about their experiences, and these friends told their friends, they began to be besieged for advice. So they wrote up their experiences and self-published
Across Asia on the Cheap
, which they stapled together on their kitchen table in Sydney and sold for $1.80 a copy.

They sold 1500 copies the first week, and a new business was born. For their follow-up guidebook, the Wheelers travelled throughout Southeast Asia in 1975. At this time the fires from the Vietnam War were still smouldering and tourist travel in the region was almost unheard of. Yet
South East Asia on a Shoestring
proved another immediate success. Go forward thirty-plus years and the Lonely Planet guides have inspired imitators like the Rough Guides travel books and have carved out a large slice of the travel book market. Lonely Planet now employ over 400 staff and have annual revenues of more than A$100 million.

It is not like Tony Wheeler is a reckless man. Nor, with an MBA from the London School of Economics, is he the potsmoking hippie some may expect. At the same time, says Tony (I've had the pleasure of meeting him too, and he is an inspiring person), 'We knew nothing about publishing.' The Wheelers simply took action based on their own experiences, the eagerness of friends and acquaintances to learn from them and their gut instincts.

Not that financial success came overnight. For a time they were so broke they would steam unfranked stamps off incoming mail and reuse them. That's creative recycling for you. This is the kind of hunger we need in our bigger organisations. A get down and dirty and make it happen kind of attitude. Imagine what you could do with that desire and the money that so many of our bigger businesses have access to. Some months things were so bad that the Wheelers would go to dinner with their friends, pay on credit card and collect their buddies' share of the bill in cash to get them through the month.

Go and find someone who is boot-strapping a new project or prototype in your business and help get it off the ground. Tell their story to everyone in your company. Celebrate this kind of internal entrepreneurialism.

So many businesses have started just this way. Anita Roddick's Body Shop chain is another great example. This is how strategy gets done. Through action we get clarity.

If you have never watched the TV show
House
, then you should. It is a crash course in twenty-first century strategy. Without boring you with all the details, Dr House has a worldwide reputation as a brilliant diagnostician. In the medical profession, prescription in advance of diagnosis is generally considered a form of malpractice. Yet when he is confronted with patients whose ailments fit no obvious pattern, House boldly acts on the belief that prescription
is
diagnosis. He acts on his best hunch and, assuming the patients survive, adjusts their treatment according to their reaction to the first treatment.

Now I know it seems a little crazy to use a TV show as an example, but I can assure you the metaphor is powerful. Dr House only takes the most complicated cases, patients for whom he is the last resort. The more ambiguous and confusing the patient's symptoms, the more interested he is. He takes the seemingly unsolvable cases and solves them. He does it by acting on the best information he can get at the time of diagnosis, without knowing for sure if he is right, and he treats the patient as though he is right. His reasoning is that if he is right then great, the patient will get better. And if he is wrong, not only will he now rule that educated guess off his list of possible illnesses, but the patient's response to the treatment will give him a better insight into what is wrong. Or said another way, action enhances clarity.

I was having a conversation recently with one of Australia's leading equity traders, who was mortified when I suggested that action should precede clarity. Of course he was: as an equities trader, he always wants to make as informed a decision as possible before investing millions of his client?' money. (Equally, despite using the
House
example above, there is no way I am suggesting that doctors should go and prescribe drugs to patients on a whim.) However, there is still an element of doubt when he makes that investment. There is always a risk. He can use many inventive financial plays to mitigate that risk, but can never do it completely. In a way, he is taking action without complete clarity every day, even if he would never say this out loud.

The point is, you can't let the presence of risk or the absence of clarity prevent you from taking action. Whether that action be an investment, an attempt to ask someone out on a date or a more serious attempt to cure a patient suffering from what at first seems like an incurable disease.

WE HAVE A REMARKABLE CAPACITY FOR STRATEGY ON THE GO

It may seem like a bit of a stretch, but if you really think about it human beings have been doing strategy on the go throughout the course of time. From as far back as studies have looked into, the early hunter-gatherer lifestyle conditioned human beings to be opportunistic foragers in a constantly changing environment. That required decisionmaking on the move.Where is the best place to look for food today? How are we going to work together to find food as the weather changes day by day and season by season?

This lifestyle naturally stimulated our creativity and problem-solving skills and as societies evolved and became more complex these skills were honed in ever more challenging environments.

When you think about it, it is very strange that we as people have become geared against, rather than towards, change. We arrange our organisations around command and control instead of around what has worked for most of time: change and adapt (
flipping
). Weekly I work with organisations with structures, reporting lines and cultures that are against the very notion of flipping and are for consistency and predictability. Even though at some level the organi-sations know this is dysfunctional – otherwise they wouldn't have asked me to consult with them – they resist hearing the fact and acting on it.

Human success at adapting to changing conditions periodically lulls us into thinking that we've got it all figured out. Then we start developing and trusting long-term plans, which sooner or later – usually sooner – are exploded by a changing world. It is as though the phenomenal success of business in the last century, and especially the last few decades, has created a sort of arrogance that we can predict the future. I think it is fair to say we are increasingly feeling that confidence shaken as the four forces of change come to bear on our daily reality.

In what area of your business have you become overconfident? What do you assume to be immutable today that may become irrelevant tomorrow? The truth is human beings are always much better off and much more productive when they abandon the desire to command and control things and accept the need to change and adapt to them. While the industrial age lent itself towards systemising and efficiency, that is not the case with the knowledge age, creative age or – as I like to think of it – the relationship age. We think better on our feet, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi documented in his classic book
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
, and as Malcolm Gladwell also shows in his more recent examination of our capacity to make quick decisions in
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
.

Of particular importance to this point is when Gladwell reports studies that demonstrate that we actually learn and adapt much faster than we think we do. We have a reliable ability to make decisions on the spot which are every bit as accurate as those over which we deliberate for months. We make
excellent
decisions quickly.

One study into the 'adaptive unconscious', as it is known, used two decks of cards – one was stacked with cards that made it hard to win, one with cards that made it much more likely that you would win. Over time, test subjects gradually altered their behaviour to draw more cards from the winning deck. But
more
interestingly, players actually altered their behaviour
before
they reported that they had consciously detected a pattern. They were physically learning faster than they thought they were.

Gladwell argues, based on this and a whole host of other evidence, that 'decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately'. One of many possible examples of human beings' ability to make accurate judgements quickly is a 2006 study that showed people could predict the result of political elections after seeing just ten seconds of footage of the candidates.

It is true: every action is a gamble, and that's scary. But like I said, we're evolved to thrive on taking lots of hunter-gatherer gambles every day. So stop complaining, because the time has come to . . .

BUILD A BRIDGE AND GET OVER IT!

We're all scared. Seriously.We do our best to pretend we are not, but even the most senior executives I meet are freaking out. What if this new idea does not pay off? What if I do not meet budget? How will the share market respond to our less than double digit growth this year? Will I lose my job? Is my partner really going to leave me? And so on. This fear compounds, and is fuelled by, the confusion that comes with the complexity of the world, especially as we try to plan further and further out into the future, resulting in a paralysis of inaction.

Consider the photographic industry in recent times. It is well known that this industry has been thrown into turmoil by the digital electronics revolution. Recently I worked on the issue with the Photo Marketing Association of Australia and Konica Minolta. Midway through a project for helping their retailers – mostly baby boomer 'mum and da?' operations – to promote and market digital products, Konica Minolta completely withdrew from the digital camera market globally, doing so literally overnight. One day we were working on a strategy of short-term actions to get better penetration in the market using their retail distribution network; the next day, nothing. Never mind, Sony stepped in to continue the work.

The problem was that Konica Minolta left their foray into the digital camera market too late, not releasing their first attempt, the Minolta D Image EX-1500, until 1998. They were aware of the technology, and even aware of competitors like Sony making gains in this market, but they waited as they tried to gauge the market better, searching for better information on consumers' responses to digital technology before they acted. When they finally realised that not only was digital technology here to stay, but it was already the dominant medium in consumer photography, it was too late. They had missed the early adopter's advantage. Instead of acting, they wasted time planning a response they never made to the biggest market opportunity to hit their industry in decades.

What decision have you been putting off? Make a decision
now!
Trust your instincts, and go with it.

Kodak and Sony were both pioneers of digital technology, dating as far back the mid 1970s, but it was not until the mid 1990s that digital cameras met the market requirements of fast, good and cheap at the price.

Kodak started the digital trend with the DCS-100 way back in 1991, but they were almost crippled by the 'disruptiv?' technology they introduced. Perhaps this is because film was their primary product, and the adoption of digital happened so fast that they were not ready for the change.

They seem to be back on track, and now have the number one US market share in digital cameras and photo printers. They are still struggling to achieve their old levels of profitability, but at least they're on trend. The analogue camera share of the market is fast falling to about 10 per cent, and likely lower.

Sony got in fast enough, but only just, with their CyberShot in 1996. As stated above they had been playing in this space for two decades, and still they almost missed the boat. They almost looked so long and hard that the opportunity passed them by. They had the same incomplete information and the same technological resources as Konica Minolta, and they faced the same ambiguity. Fortunately for employees and shareholders, Sony chose to act first and refine their planning second. Before writing Konica Minolta off, they are focusing on selling printing paper to be used for printing digital photographs, which to date is a very popular activity.

When digital cameras first came on the market, no one anticipated how quickly consumers would embrace them. But the nature of modern consumers is that they act
fast
. Either you move fast as well, or you lose.

After I spoke about the digital camera revolution and its implications at a conference on behalf of my client Sony, a small business owner I'll call Jack (not his real name) approached me for some advice. Three years before he had owned half a dozen photo developing shops free and clear, with net positive cash flow of $250,000 each. On that basis he was making a lot of speculative investments and planning to retire in eight years.

When he came to me, Jack was down to one shop, which was barely breaking even.He no longer owned the freehold on the shop, but had been forced to sell it to service the debt on his speculative investments, which crashed when the technology stock bubble burst. To top it all off, his wife had left him.

As this example should make clear, when I talk about the need to stop planning and start acting, I'm not talking about acting blindly. Jack wanted to believe that his plan was foolproof and he resisted looking at the accumulating evidence that it was not. While he was carrying on with his wishful thinking, his smart competitors were beginning to offer digital photography lessons, digital photo frames, online photo album and scrapbook design and other value-added services, using market feedback to find out what customers wanted most. Also, making speculative investments is not really the same as strategy on the go.