Action speaks the man.

First of all, I must inform you that the concept of a car with square wheels is not mine - I heard it long ago at a presentation on lateral thinking. It is with some credit to the presenter that the lesson is learned and I am now using the concept in a new way.

Leaders from two different countries attended a forum on action-orientation and was presented with the challenge of building a car with square wheels. This action will help propel their 'developing' country a little notch up the economic and technological ladder.

One leader went back and presented the challenge to his cabinet and national think tank and action committee. Pondering over the challenge, they explored ways to make that concept a possible reality given the improbablility of the concept. They ended with a fantatic array of technological innovations based on a suspension system that would have made the car with square wheels possible and went on to become a technological leader in that field.

The other leader went back home and consulted his economic advisers on how much money they can make in preparing to build a car with square wheels and made it possible. Contracts worth millions were given up towards drawing up the specifications for a car with square wheels while billions were given out for the infrastructure required for the car with square wheels to work based on different axle widths for the square threaded roads. Contracts were then awarded to start building the square threaded roads and when public outcry denounced the stupidity of the project, it was finally cancelled 'in order to save the country billions' that would have been wasted.

Now where have I heard of this before?

The anatomy of failure

Well planned lines of action rarely fail - they are not designed to. Of course, nobody is infallible and the occasional unexpected failure of the best of plans do happen. But does anyone seriously expect a whole series of important, well planned lines to action to fail, one after another? I dont.

Recently, in the Malaysian political landscape, a few, VERY IMPORTANT and well planned actions has appeared to fail. If some quarters are to be believed, Anwar's sodomy case is a very well planned set-up by the powers to be and yet we have fatal flaws in a supposed well planned set-up such as an unexpected visit by the complainant to a doctor who punctured holes in his claim of sodomy. Not less spectecular is the statutory declaration by PI Subramaniam making earth shaking claims regarding the Deputy Prime Minister only to retract it the very next day via another statutory declaration-making him libel to making a false statement (the first or second statutory declaration) under oath. Ditto the famous 16 September dead line of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. And the infamous submission of 'cut and paste' evidence by, no less the prosecution, in the RPK criminal defamation case. We are talking very important, well planned lines of action here and yet all of them looks like they are likely to end in failure. Why, one might ask, when the best laid plans of mice and men all failing in such a short span of time?

My humble opinion - these plans DID NOT fail. They all succeeded in their objectives which was to fail in the first place. This is the only logical explanation for so many well laid plans failing in such a short period. Why plan to fail in the first place? Well, I'll be darned if I know.