Strategy - Winning Wars in The Boardroom & Beyond E-Book

Muhammad Fataar

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Description:

The book, Strategy - Winning Wars in The Boardroom & Beyond, is a humble attempt to take strategy, which is implemented from the boardrooms down to the laymen on the floor, and to clear up the aura surrounding the phrase quoted by many a manager, and to give it simple context so that it can be taken home by all levels of employment, even the cleaners, and to understand it to the degree that they could own it and implement it in their daily lives. 

I am also trying to inculcate who I am, my background, my journey through life, and my Creator, into this system and thus looking at various faculties in Islam that could aid in our endeavor to continuously improve ourselves. My journey covers some aspects of my life and thus mostly the stories would be personal to try to make the laymen understand and to show how I was guided through my journey.

Lastly, I am also trying to prevent others from making the mistakes I have made and for this reason I have included some sort of guide that could be followed, whether you are corporate or medium or small enterprises or whether you are a merchant or a trader, that would take you, should you follow it religiously and God Willing, to certain success.

Alhamdu Lillaah for the Creator of all who have sent us our beloved Prophet (May Peace and Blessings be upon him and his family), to show us how to live and how to be with others.

Leseprobe

Muhammad Fataar

Strategy - Winning Wars in The Boardroom & Beyond

2020 - Where Are You Going To Be?

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

DEDICATIONS

 STRATEGY –WINNING WARS IN BOARDROOMS & BEYOND 

DEDICATIONS:

TO ALLAH

The Perfect One who gave me the strength and the intellect to compile all this knowledge He gave me so freely, Glory to You, into a book and the ability to follow through with this project until completion.

To My Family:

Zainonessah

Nuhaa

Muhammad Mu’ammar Hamas

Muhammad Solahuddin Ayatullah

Hanaan

Asinaat

Shukran for affording me the time to compile this book - the first of many to come.

Remember Me and Remember This:

A Lesson Learnt

Is a Victory Earned

So take a Positive Step every day towards Your Future

CHAPTER 0NE - INTRODUCTION

STRATEGY –WINNING WARS IN BOARDROOMS & BEYOND

CHAPTER 01 - INTRODUCTION Thousands of years ago, the best strategists could be found on the battlefield and one of the best of them was a guy who was nicknamed, "The Sword of God", who was responsible for upsetting the Romans and the fall of both the Persian empire and the Byzantine empire. His body was filled with scars, but his mind was filled with the movements and fighting style of his enemies and how he could upset this, using his lightly armed forces and the hot desert sun to his advantage. With no more than a sword, a shield and a horse, he and approximately five hundred men managed to fight on the eastern and western fronts, crushing both the world's super powers of the time with one battle and without weapons of mass destruction. The question before us is, how did he do it? Was his blade really ordained by God as the locals professed and named him? Was he really the only general in history who had fought more than a hundred battles without losing a single fight and who didn't die on the battlefield? What was his secret to attaining such valor and honor? Much like today he had men surrounding him to advise him of their thoughts and expertise and the ideas of every man and woman who was with him counted. At one point, the battle wasn't going in their favor and he took a shot at the general of his enemy. Getting very close to killing the enemy general, the enemy got so frightened that they retreated in their fortress. While they were busy tending to wounded and burying their dead, a young soldier came up to him and volunteered to be thrown over the wall into the enemy's camp. Once there he would fight his way through and open the gates for them to enter. His shocked advisors protested, but Khalid ibn Waleed, after careful consideration and understanding where they were in the battle at that moment, allowed it to be done, and they won. The human race has been defined by many wars since the beginning of time until now and the biggest war we will ever encounter is the war that rages on within ourselves. All of us have demons that are haunting our very existence and we need to learn to embrace the constant conflict that we find ourselves in. Muhammad SAW, the son of Abdullah and the most peace loving and forgiving of all human creation, was no different; many wars plagued not just him but also his people from way before he was born, and up until today. In his own time the numerous tribal wars led to the installation of countless instructions to protect them and the people visiting the holy places, and to the sacred months created in which fighting was prohibited. One of these laws was that his City would be a sanctuary for everyone. When he grew up and became the leader of his people, he was forced to participate in wars with their enemies and although he himself didn’t want to fight the people he grew up amongst, he could understand what necessitated it and why Allah would instruct him to do so.

With orders from above, he started collecting the skills of a general as he went along. Part of war, was knowing what was happening around him in his own environment, knowing what was happening at the camp of his enemies and what was happening in the space in between them that could alter the outcome of the battle at hand. When he arrived in a town called Qubah after his own people in Makkah was set on killing him and he had to migrate from his hometown to Madinah, being the most peace loving creature in the world, naturally his first concern would be to further the course of it and for that reason he did two things to promote it. The first one was the lecture he gave at a congregation in which he said to his followers: “Spread Peace, Feed the one who is in need, Mend ties with your families, and perform prayers in the night when people are sleeping if you want to enter paradise with the peace of your Lord.

The second thing he concentrated on whilst away from persecution was to create peace treaties with tribes surrounding The City of Light. These peace treaties was part of his three pronged strategy system to get the upper hand over the clans from Makkah, to ensure peace with surrounding tribes of Makkah – to ensure that they do not need to deal with additional threats at home, and to proliferate their assets in order to support the new military system that has to be provided for. The second step was gathering of intelligence. Crucial to all organizations that have competitors, is to know what their edge is and how they are planning to utilize it. For this purpose small groups of men were dispatched into various directions to gather information, so that proper measures could be taken in prevailing over his enemies. The units were kept small and lightly armed, to prevent suspicion and to prevent getting detected.

The third step of this strategy, was to launch raids against the caravans that were making their way to and from Syria, collect the merchandise they were carrying, and to use these funds to boost the abilities of their army by providing mobility, defense by means of armor, striking capabilities by means of upgraded weapons, and to distribute to those who are in need not just to be kind to them, but also win them over as allies should the need arise.

When Ikrimah ibn Umar, Safwaan ibn Umaya, Amr ibn Al Aas and Khalid ibn Waleed found themselves in Damascus, they were in awe of the troops of the Roman Empire who was the currently in command of this City. Ikrimah ibn Umar and Safwaan ibn Umaya started scoffing at the idea Muhammad PBUH promised his followers the keys to this city and plenty other like it, due to the fact that the Arab troops could never amount to anything like this due to their infighting and their identification with clans fighting for honor or to raid caravans, instead of a wider picture of forming a nation, and due to the fact that everyone was greedy for power, it was Khalid ibn Waleed who put them in check. He told them that they should not underestimate their own people…

And what he explained next was of even more value than loyalty to their people. He described to them how Muhammad PBUH, who was currently situated in Madinah, was reforming the troops of the clans he was strategically aligning himself with, how he is using the funds he raises from the raids against the trade routes not for his own benefit, but for the benefit of the army and the people, and how he is surrounding himself with the most tactical people, in order to draw from them the ability to create an army that would be able to hold its own against these troops and garrisons they are seeing in front of them today.

Soon Kalid ibn Waleed and Amr ibn Al Aas, the best amongst the Quraish’s generals and master minds respectively, would be amongst those tacticians surrounding Muhammad PBUH, advising him about the ways of the enemy and the way forward. Him, Muhammad PBUH, would not make the same mistake as the Quraish did, to underestimate his enemy, or to disregard the directions of anyone willing to advise him, let alone these two young and brilliant minds that joined his ranks

But after all the most intricate strategies that were practiced by the Strategy Genius, Muhammad PBUH, it was the ones that he used off the battlefields that carried the most weight. In the words of one of the best known humanitarians to walk the face of this Earth;

“- I became more than ever convinced, that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and his mission. These, and not the sword, carried everything before them and surmounted to every obstacle. When I closed the second volume of the Prophet’s Biography, I was sorry there was not more for me to read of this great life.”                 

                                                           - Mahatma Gandhi

The strategies he adopted with his peers, friends and relatives are the ones that carried him through, and this should be our goal in life too. If we really want to win the war, we have to make preparations through bonding with the people that will cheer for us and will be able to support us in a time when the chips are down and when our own people and the rest of the world is willing to write us off as crazy. We need to learn to put Strategies in place for the future. We need to learn to put Strategies in place for the simple, and for the difficult…

Time for the main question that everybody is thinking about at this time… WHAT IS STRATEGY AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? 

THE BEST MINDS IN BUSINESS

[email protected]

CHAPTER TWO - THE IMPORTANCE OF PLANNING AHEAD

STRATEGY –WINNING WARS IN BOARDROOMS & BEYOND

CHAPTER 02 - IMPORTANCE OF PLANNING AHEAD

Who was it that said: "If we fail to plan, we plan to fail"?

And who was it that said: "Unsuccessful people make decisions based on their current situation, whilst successful people make decisions based on where they wanna be"?

We are all so trapped in today, in trying to stay alive, that we forget to plan for tomorrow and thus the cycle of fighting from day to day keeps re-occurring and conditions gets worse in the process. Yes, indeed, breaking away from that cycle is extremely difficult and for that reason, most people choose not to take this path. Fear has them curling up in their holes, clinging to their version of life, but it is Allah (God) that says this in the Qur-an: 

“Have We not made for him a pair of eyes?

And a tongue and a pair of lips?

And shown him the two highways?

But he has made no haste on the path that is steep…”

Chapter 90 v 8 - 11

So in light of all this above, I'd like to start this chapter with two questions:

1 What happens if we plan?

2 What happens if we fail to plan?

Most people are afraid of new things and making plans necessarily brings the need to change as they get to setting goals and when they think that they might achieve these goals it brings fear to their hearts. Others are afraid of creating any types of plans and literally shuts down to projections of any kind. As they do this, the possibility of any goal that could have been created seem too far-fetched or impossible to achieve, but what they don’t realize is that this life is filled with progress from one step to another. Should they consider their current positions they would come to realize that where they are now is a result of making little progress each day, over a long period of time and failure to take any action is a rejection of what they have already become.

In the life of ordinary people it is believed that planning is an unnecessary waste of time and unrealistic, as ordinary people don't have all the fancy objects the rich people worry about. They have just enough to make ends meet and they are quite content, so they would rather spend their time on something more useful like watching TV or fixing the car or going to friends. Truth be told, there are much more simplistic things where we fail to plan for, like choosing the correct husband or wife, or the food we eat, or choosing the friends we hang out with. In each of these occasions above we might think that planning for these items might be crossing a line and that we should just go with the flow. In each of these occurrences though we find that later in our lives we are struggling with some marital problems or we end up getting discarded by our friends or we end up having major health issues like developing cancer or diabetes or something worse.

When we look at each of these examples used we find that without planning or with insufficient planning, we tend to adopt take anything that is headed our way. So when the spouse is cheating on you, you don't think that because of a lack of planning you're sitting with a guy you knew was a womanizer and that he is still who he was from day one. Falling into the pressures of friends doesn't just happen with kids but also with adults. If you never smoked when you were on school, why would you start a filthy, addictive habit like that? Getting in with the wrong crowd can ruin your life. These friends could handle the alcohol and drugs better than you, so the hole they're digging is for you. When they become sober and you can't kick the habit be sure they'll drop you like a hot potato. Obesity is the fastest growing illness in America and the rest of the world is not far behind. When people become fat they tend to ward inquiries off with the saying; "It's the good life". What they don't know is that it is a curse. Fat people have more difficult lives because they have to live with this extra weight that is dragging them down and gradually, this increased fat on their bodies is causing it to be over exerted and with aging bodies they tend to accumulate muscle pains all over. Then there is still the emotional factor attached to being fat. It requires a skill to be able to live with society, past, present and future, as a fat person without being emotionally affected by what they say to you and about you. We do not need to go into the fact that, besides getting fat from being gluttonous, there are also other health factors that needs to be taken into consideration such as gastrointestinal disorders. Most of the most dangerous diseases today develop from stomach disorders, and we are so indifferent about it, until we contract a major illness When we look at the individual person we believe that success is when we have broken through the fetters of our childhood prisons and we have left behind the poverty stricken areas where we grew-up in. With our perfect spouses, peach & pear offspring, our perfect careers; life couldn't be any more perfect here in suburbia. This is just perfect, except we refuse to plan our financial future or to even look at our financial statements. In fact, in our perfect little lives, this is the only thing that we hate about it and because we hate it, it will be our downfall. The financial system is rigged to chew down your finances with interest that no one forecasts for you, so that you can be another victim of their financial trap. If you do not take this bull by the horns, you will end up returning that fancy car to the bank you borrowed the money from and your house will land up on auction and you will have to move back with mommy and daddy in the ghetto you were raised in and your perfect little wife will file for divorce and custody of the peach & pear you love so dearly. Worst still is that you thought taking the car back to the dealer will clear you of that debt and that the auction would take care of the mortgage debt. It doesn't, you are still liable to the bank for whatever debt is not recovered and on top of that you must now also come up with money for child support. This is the financial nightmare that awaits you if you refuse to take charge of it. If you love suburbia and you love your life, the only way to save it is to learn to love looking at your financial status and make plans to boost it, and then implement those plans strictly. These are but four areas of our lives where planning ahead could prevent us a lot of pain and heartache. Sitting down and sourcing through things will make our lives happier and healthier. When we don't plan for anything we will accept everything. So no, planning is not a choice we can make or ignore in our lives but it is a necessity that no one can do without, for both individuals and businesses.