You as a leader
Before view, before plan, before action — there is the question of the leader himself.
Strategy · Part IV · CEO-Strategy.nl
The three articles before this one described a process. View — the act of perception before analysis. Plan — the creative act of giving vision a form. Action — the human meeting the earth, stripped of the protection of frameworks.
What they didn't address is the condition that makes all three possible.
Because view, plan, and action don't fail because the methodology is wrong. They fail because the person at the centre is not aligned. And no methodology can fix that.
In Chinese philosophy, the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming, 天命) is not a title. It's not granted by an institution or confirmed by a board. It describes an alignment between the leader and the living process of the situation he is in. When it's present, things move through him. Decisions arrive with clarity. The organisation feels direction without being pushed. The situation unfolds.
When it's absent, the leader forces. He controls. He manages perception rather than responding to reality. He mistakes his position for his authority and his thinking for his vision. And eventually, the situation — the earth, the people, the conditions — stops responding. Not in open revolt. In quiet withdrawal. The organisation goes through the motions. The strategy lands nowhere.
Sun Tzu knew this. His ideal general is not the most intelligent man in the room. He is the most aligned. He sees clearly because nothing in him is distorting the signal. He acts decisively because no internal opposition slows the response. He is available to the process — not managing it, not controlling it, moving with it.
The question for any CEO is not "do I have the right strategy?" It is "am I aligned enough to see the situation as it actually is?"
Ziran (自然) is usually translated as "nature" but that flattens it. The Chinese means something closer to "self-so" — the way things are of themselves, without forcing. The tree doesn't decide to grow toward the light. The river doesn't choose its course. They express what they are, completely, without internal opposition to themselves.
This is the first principle a leader needs to know. Not as philosophy. As a practical description of how alignment works.
The leader who knows Ziran doesn't impose himself on the situation. He doesn't arrive with the answer and fit the situation to it. He arrives open, and allows what is actually present to reach him. His perception is uncontaminated by what he needs to be true. His response arises from what he actually sees.
This sounds simple. It is extraordinarily difficult. Because between the situation and the leader's perception stands everything the leader has invested in being right — his self-image, his track record, his reputation, his fear. All of it distorts the signal before it reaches him.
Ziran is the condition in which that distortion is absent. It cannot be installed by a training programme. It arrives through the continuous, honest practice of seeing oneself clearly.
Wu-wei (無為) is the practice that follows from Ziran. It is not inaction. The translation "non-doing" misleads. Wu-wei is action that arises from the situation rather than from the leader's agenda for the situation.
Schwarzkopf didn't force the Left Hook into existence. He saw the empty western flank and the plan arose from that perception. Marshall didn't impose the rebuilding of Germany on a resistant reality. He saw what the vision required and moved with the conditions that existed. Neither man was passive. Both were completely active — but their action expressed the situation rather than opposing it.
The leader who practises wu-wei is not the leader who does less. He is the leader whose action meets no unnecessary resistance — because it is aligned with what the situation is actually offering. He doesn't spend force fighting the earth. He moves with it.
This is what makes certain leaders seem effortless. Not that they work less. That they waste nothing on opposition — external or internal.
The Buddha's Second Noble Truth identifies the origin of suffering as tanha — craving. The demand that reality be other than it is. The clinging to what was, the pushing toward what we want, the refusal of what is actually present.
Every leader who loses alignment does so through this mechanism. The market isn't behaving as the model predicted. The organisation is further from readiness than the plan assumed. The earth is not the earth the strategy was built for. And something in the leader opposes this. He argues with it. He delays acknowledging it. He manages the reporting so the gap isn't visible. He protects the plan against the reality rather than updating the plan from the reality.
That opposition — that tanha — is the break in alignment. It is entirely internal. The situation didn't cause it. The situation simply revealed it.
The leader who has worked through this doesn't become passive in the face of bad news. He becomes faster. Because nothing in him needs to resist it first. The information arrives, is received as it is, and the response follows. No delay. No distortion. No protection of the previous position.
This is why "being comfortable with not knowing" is not a personality trait or a management style. It is the direct consequence of having released the demand that things be certain before action is taken. The leader who needs to know before he moves will always be late. The situation will always be ahead of him.
The I Ching's sixty-first hexagram is Zhong Fu — Inner Truth. Two open lines at the centre, firm lines above and below. The image is of an empty space held by a stable structure. What is hollow at the centre is what makes the bell ring.
This hexagram describes the only place where free will genuinely operates.
Not in controlling outcomes. The leader does not control outcomes. The earth does not negotiate. The flood doesn't ask for the plan. The market moves by its own logic. The organisation has its own life. Outcomes are the result of the interaction between the leader's action and everything the situation contains — most of which the leader did not put there and cannot move.
Not in forcing the earth. Wu-wei has already told us this. Force against the terrain wastes what cannot be wasted.
Free will operates only here: in the inner alignment of the leader himself. The choice is always and only this — am I true to what I actually perceive, or am I managing my perception to protect my position?
That is the only freedom available. And it is total. No situation removes it. No board, no market, no crisis takes it away. The leader always has the choice to see clearly or to protect himself from seeing clearly. Everything else follows from that choice.
Nunchi (눈치) is the Korean capacity to read what is unspoken — to feel the temperature of a room, to know before being told, to sense the shift before it becomes visible. In its ordinary form it is a social skill, a reading of signals. But what you need as a leader is nunchi as second nature. Not a technique applied to a situation. A permanent state of receptivity that operates below the level of conscious processing.
The difference is the gap. Nunchi as technique still has a gap between the perception and the response — a moment of processing, of interpretation, of decision. Nunchi as second nature has no gap. The room shifts and the leader is already moving. Not because he is fast. Because he is present.
The same applies to shì. The strategic potential of the situation is not something the aligned leader calculates. He surfs it. He feels the weight of it gathering and moves before it breaks. Schwarzkopf didn't analyse his way to the Left Hook. He felt the emptiness in the west and was already moving troops before the staff had finished the map.
This is shì as second nature. It cannot be taught as a framework. It develops through the sustained practice of being honest about what you actually perceive — and acting from that, regardless of what it costs the previous position.
This is the foundation that view, plan, and action rest on. Not a prerequisite that you satisfy once and move past. A continuous condition that either holds or doesn't.
When the leader is aligned — when Ziran is present, when tanha is released, when the Mandate of Heaven holds — view is clear, plan is genuinely creative, and action flows with the earth. The three stages work because the person at the centre is working. Not thinking harder. Not controlling more carefully. Being more honest, more present, more available to what is actually happening.
When alignment breaks — when the leader starts protecting his position against reality, when he mistakes his self-image for his capability, when he needs certainty before he can move — the whole process corrupts from the inside. The view becomes a confirmation of what he already believed. The plan becomes a defence of the last position. The action meets the earth and fractures because the leader couldn't feel where the earth actually was.
No strategy survives a misaligned leader. And no methodology, framework, or planning process substitutes for the inner work of knowing yourself clearly enough to see the situation as it is.
The thunder starts the process. The question is whether the leader is there to hear it.