The Possibility That Came Before the Strategy

At Plasan, I encountered the question from which this book grew. How do you build the ability to act when you do not know what will happen?

In the early 2000s, I was asked to lead a process at a small Israeli company in the armor protection field, Plasan Sasa. The process was called MBO, Management by Objectives. The company was growing. Its direction needed to become a work plan that employees could understand and implement.

But the strategy existed mainly between the ears of the CEO, Dani Ziv. My role was to help translate what he saw into an annual plan and coordinated action.

At the time, I read every strategy book I could get my hands on. I knew the theories and used the tools. Yet I felt that something was missing. That feeling stayed with me in my work with other companies, in Israel and around the world.

Only in retrospect did I begin to understand what I had seen at Plasan.

As I remember it, the company began by making apple crates from composite materials. Dani looked at the technology and asked what else could be done with it. Could it be used to protect people and vehicles?

The existing product became a starting point for a new possibility.

He later recruited people with exceptional practical talent and established a vehicle workshop. The challenge was to develop armor that could be integrated into a vehicle while preserving its performance and stability.

I recall that the Chairman requested the CEO to prepare a separate profit and loss (P&L) statement for the workshop. As an economist, I thought this missed the stage the team had reached. It was engaged in research and development. Its cost needed to be examined, but so did its learning, its progress and the capability it was building.

When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created major demand for armor, that capability was already maturing. As I remember it, the activity became a central driver of the company’s growth.

Today, I also understand something about my own mistake. I was looking for the right strategy within what I knew how to anticipate. Dani, (the CEO) trained as an architect, could imagine an outcome and work backward to discover what was needed to build it. That is how I now interpret his approach.

This gave rise to the question that drives this work: how do we think about possibilities that are not yet part of our picture of reality?

The path I want to explore begins by clarifying our purpose. What kind of company do we want to be, and what do we want to make possible? From that purpose, we will formulate a foundational principle to guide our choices. Thinking from first principles will help us test our assumptions about reality. From there, we will create possibilities and examine which deserve development.

Strategy tools help us choose, allocate resources and execute. But first, we need to expand the space of possibilities within which those tools operate.

This is where the book comes from: an attempt, after years of practice, to understand how we can interpret reality and create something new within it.

How this work is structured

This line of thought also led me to question the form of the book itself. If I want to help people interpret reality and create new possibilities, what should a work that enables them to do so look like?

I am building this work through short chapters and an evolving digital space. Each chapter presents an idea, a story or a tool that readers can apply to their own reality. The intention is to offer reading in Hebrew and English, and voice conversations that develop the idea through questions and dialogue.

To my mind, there is an important difference between reading and continuous listening. When we read, we can pause, go back and let an idea resonate with our experience. When we listen, the speech continues even when our thinking pauses. Sometimes, just as an insight emerges, we find ourselves chasing the tail of the podcast.

Those who wish can listen first to grasp the structure of an idea, then return to the text to reflect and explore it more deeply. Each chapter will include a summary and a key question to help readers return to it. Everyone will choose the path and pace that suit them.

But reading and listening are the beginning of the encounter. Readers will be able to bring a situation from their lives, examine it using my tools and develop insights with the help of AI. The AI will help them ask questions, suggest alternative interpretations and organize their thoughts. Readers will exercise their own judgment and choose what to accept.

The planned personal workspace will allow readers to document their inquiry. To connect ideas, save questions and see how their interpretation changes. They will choose what to share from this work.

In this way, they will be able to build their own book from mine.

They will choose what remains private, what they want to share and what they propose for inclusion in the shared work. Registration and feedback will also allow me to learn who encounters the work and how it helps them.

This will be an evolving work. I will bring my experience and tools. Readers will bring their reality. Through this encounter, we will explore possibilities for creating economic, human and environmental value.

This is how I now understand what I saw at Plasan. The capability was built before we knew which future would give it value. That is the lesson that guides me throughout the book.

Managing business in an age of uncertainty requires the ability to create possibilities.

A question for the reader

What capability could you start building today, before you know which opportunity will call for it?