Swiftness

其用战也贵速，久则兵钝挫锐，攻城则力屈，久暴师则国用不足。夫钝兵挫锐，屈力殚货，则诸侯乘其弊而起，虽有智者，不能善其后。故兵闻拙速，未睹巧之久也。夫兵久而国利者，未之有也。故不尽知用兵之害者，则不能尽知用兵之利也。

The purpose of raising an army is to achieve swift and decisive victory. If victory cannot be achieved quickly, the army would be lethargic and lose their fighting spirit. When they attacked city walls, they would be greatly exhausted. If the army is out on a military campaign for too long, the nation’s resources would be greatly depleted. When the army is in a bad shape and the resources of the nation are exhausted, other neighboring warlords would capitalize on these weaknesses by launching an attack on us. Even if there are clever and capable strategists or advisors, they would not be able to reverse the situation.

While blunders are known to occur during military operations, one has yet witness a successful military operations where there are long delays. No one has seen a military campaign where the longer the campaign, the more beneficial it is to the nation.

Someone who does not fully understand the inherent danger of deploying troops would also not understand the advantages of using it.

Now where can we apply the concept of swiftness in business? Well most people would say, when we launch a marketing campaign, it must be swift and capture the attention of target market fast. Or when we want to implement a strategy against business competitors, the strategy must be implemented swiftly so that 'damage' is done without any resistance from our business competitors. These are normal areas most people can think of when applying swiftness.

In my opinion, there are other places where swiftness can be used as well. Recently, the SK-II saga in China is one good example where swiftness can be applied. When facing bad press, a company should swiftly have a plan to compensate those affected and also do what a responsible company should do, for example, product recall and make arrangement for refund of payment. By responding to these crises fast, would you be able to firstly reduce damage, secondly, do not let customer loyalty drop down too much so much so it does not pass the threshold level and you may even get new customers as well, because consumers will know that buying your product will reduce the risk they have to bear. And in times like this, if you swifly reduce damage, you may have a few less customers to badmouth about your services.

So how can we act swiftly? The key is to overprepare and always play out many possible scenarios. For example if you are in the food business, there maybe food poisoning, illegal substance found in raw materials, medical studies show that eating one of the raw materials you use is harmful and so on. You have to have your whole supply and manufacturing process put on a piece of paper and play out the various scenario that can happen to each stage of the process, and through these scenarios, play out what are the rectifying plan you can have, to swiftly counter the scenario.