“Sometimes You’ll Have to ʻZig’ When the Blueprint Says ʻZag.’” In his autobiography, Michael Bloomberg, No. 9 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world with assets of $55 billion, details the earliest days of his company. One of his key insights is that rigid planning can do more harm than good: “Youʼll inevitably face problems different from the ones you anticipated. Sometimes youʼll have to ʻzigʼ when the blueprint says ʻzag.ʼ You donʼt want a detailed, inflexible plan getting in the way when you have to respond instantly.” While his competitors were still busy trying to come up with the perfect final design, he was already working on the fifth version of his prototype. “It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.” Bloomberg stressed that making forecasts about new business ideas is mostly a useless and meaningless task. “The noise in the assumptions you have to make is so great, and the knowledge you have of strange areas so limited, that all the detailed analysis is usually irrelevant.” “If You Plan, You Lose. If You Don’t Plan, YouWin.” The Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma is just as sceptical as Bloomberg when it comes to rigid business plans. Worth $34.6 billion, the founder of Alibaba is now the richest man in China. When he was trying to get his business off the ground, he approached venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to raise money. The investors he met expected him to present a fully developed business plan. But, much like Bloomberg, Jack Ma did not have a business plan. His motto was: “If you plan, you lose. If you donʼt plan, you win.” But from the outset, he thought big and set himself very ambitious goals. Shortly after he founded his company, he told a journalist: “We donʼt want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world.” He was so convinced of his future success that he even had a meeting filmed in his modest apartment in February 1999—as a document for the companyʼs later history. During the small meeting, he posed the following question: “In the next five or ten years, what will Photo: Wikicommons - Casa Rosada CEO Today Af r i ca Award s 2021 - Becoming a Bi l l i onai re Wi thout a Bus ines s Plan - - 40 -
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