|
Position Awareness
Opportunity Development
Situational Response
Position Awareness
 Position awareness
gives you a framework for understanding your strategic
position. It also enables you to see your position as part of a larger
environment surrounded by other positions. You can understand which aspect
of your position are secure and which are the most dynamic and likely to
change.
Sun Tzu defines a competitive "position" as your area of control
within your larger environment. His methods of positioning awareness force
you to see yourself
in the eyes of others. Using these techniques, you broaden your
perspective by gathering a range of viewpoints.
As an individual, you have a unique and valuable
viewpoint, but every viewpoint is inherently limited by its own position.
The result is that people cannot get a useful perspective on their own
situations and surrounding opportunities. The first techniques of
positioning awareness involve learning what information is relevant. The
most advanced techniques teach how to gather that information and put it
into a bigger picture.
Most people see their lives as the sum of their past successes and
failures. Most people dwell on their mistakes while simultaneously sitting
on their laurels. Sun Tzu's system forces you to see your position
differently. How you arrived at your current position doesn't matter. In
his framework, the only thing that matters is where you are going and how
you are going to get there. As you begin to develop your strategic
reflexes, you start to think more and more about how to secure your
current position and advance it.
Most people see all the details of their lives, but they cannot see
what those detail mean in terms of the big picture. As you master position
awareness, you don't see your life as a point but as a path. You see your
position in terms of what is changing and what resources
are available. You are more aware of your ability to make decisions
and your skills in working with others. Most importantly, this system
forces you to get in touch with your core set of goals and values.
Untrained people usually see their life in terms of absolutes:
successes and failures, good luck and bad, weakness and strength. As you
begin to master position awareness, you begin to see all comparisons of
strength and weakness are temporary and relative. A position is not strong
or weak in itself. Its strength or weakness depends on how it compares or
"fits" with surrounding positions. Weakness and strength are not what a
position is, but how you use it.
Positional awareness gives you the specialized
vocabulary you need to understanding how situations develop.
Mastering this vocabulary, you begin to see the leverage points connecting
past and future. You replace vague conceptions of "strength,"
"momentum," and "innovation" with much more pragmatic definitions that you
can actually use on a day to day basis.
Mastering position awareness also changes your
relationships with other people. It teaches you a different way of judging
truth and character. This methods allow you to spot self-deception
and dishonest in others. It also allows you to understand how you can best
work with others to compensate for your different weaknesses.
Once you develop a good perspective of position, it naturally leads you
to want to learn more about how you can improve you position through
opportunity development. |