More on Principles & Dangers

• Your success depends now on getting people to unite as a group and envisage the future, as broadly conceived by you.
• To step into the unknown where few dare to tread, you must sift the masses of information and opinions that cross your desk daily, and see a picture that many do not see.
• You then have to communicate what you see and counter disagreement from others, who use conventional wisdom or comforting re-interpretations of events.

• You can maximize the likelihood of success if you can identify and swim with the deeper social forces that invariably underlie more overt and possibly transient trends.
• As predicting on the basis of potential means going out on a limb, so moving with social forces means jumping on a bandwagon in its earliest stages.
• Be careful when the popular trend runs, for a period, contrary to the underlying social force, because fighting the trend is usually expensive, and makes acceptance of the deeper social force too hard for most people.
  

• Strive to see the seeds of future happenings before situations evolve to a degree that allows everyone to see them for what they are.
• Potentials are not like facts: they are subtle and hidden. You sense them through careful attention and by being attuned to your environment, supplemented by past experience and wisdom.
• You can be almost as certain about potentials that you see, as about ordinary facts, but others may well find difficulty because potential is by its nature hidden, doubtful and obscure—at least in its details and the timing.

• You must predict in order to carry the group and guide its cooperative efforts, even though uncertainty is unavoidable.
• You have to use some imagination, but outcomes depend upon the way other people, firms and sometimes governments, respond to the evolving events. As a result, precision is impossible and sometimes you will get the details wrong.
  
• Because of the difficulty of prediction, people experience an overwhelming urge to hedge their bets. Do so if you can—but never in a way that cancels out the potentials you have identified.

• Because the challenge is great, you must seek to ensure that the key people you deal with, and staff in general, are given the opportunity to give of their best.
• This means recognizing and finding ways to integrate their diverse individual strengths.
  

• You must ignore the messiness of facts; simplify radically and penetrate to the essence.
• When going forward, remember that there are many ways to do it wrong and often only one way to do it right.
• This then permits you to discover the master-stroke. You must put your personal energy and organizational resources behind that single winning strategy.

• Facing reality is intrinsically painful but personal and corporate disaster is worse, so heed warning signs.
• At all times, and especially when things go wrong, it is imperative that you face reality.
• You may have to accept what seems unacceptable.
• You may have to change your views rapidly, despite risking loss of face.
• You must cut your losses early, rather than insisting that you are correct and then losing more in the long run.

Unifying around the future is difficult because knowing the future is tricky, and any picture of the future that unites people is necessarily grand and liable to become grandiose.

Social forces are irresistible in the end, but they are impersonal and riding them can weaken your volition and impair your self-direction.

Seeing potentials from a position of authority can all too easily be a vindication of past actions or an expression of biases or wishful thinking.

Making predictions that go with the flow can abet a creeping fatalism. Predictions often upset people, and they can be self-fulfilling prophecies if they are negative and inhibit action.

Integration of individual differences through any vision is unavoidably likely to be unstable and transient because people and situations change over time.

Master-strokes are often intrinsically shocking, either in their focus or unconventionality, or sometimes in their extent or resource commitment.

Facing reality is a principle for well-being, whatever the situation, for those who are reality-centred. For the rest of us, it is far more likely to cause pain, especially in relation to seeing the causes and ramifications of our actions, whether seemingly successful or unsuccessful.