I’ve been fortunate to have mentors who fundamentally changed how I think about building and scaling. This is the first in an ongoing series where I share the insights that have stayed with me — because the best lessons shouldn’t sit with one person.
This one came from A.B. It sounds simple. But I’ve seen it play out in engineering rooms, in boardrooms, and in growing businesses across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia more times than I can count:
“If you don’t use your head, you’ll have to use your legs.”
What it actually means
Think before you act. Anticipate before you move. Map the consequences before you commit resources.
It sounds obvious. But in practice, it’s one of the most consistently violated principles in project management and business operations. The excitement of momentum — the urge to move fast, to ship, to execute — creates a bias toward action over thinking. And that bias is expensive.
Every time I’ve seen a team “use their legs” — running back to fix something that could have been anticipated — the cost was always higher than the cost of thinking it through at the start. More time. More budget. More damage to credibility. More operational drag that compounds across the rest of the project.
The operational efficiency case for thinking first
Operational efficiency is not about moving fast. It’s about moving deliberately — knowing where you’re going before you start, and building the conditions for execution rather than discovering the obstacles mid-run.
In high-performance engineering environments at Ferrari and Rimac-Bugatti, the teams that delivered consistently were not the ones that started the fastest. They were the ones that planned the most carefully — risk assessments, feasibility checks, clear targets — before a single component was ordered or a single line of code was written.
That upfront investment in thinking paid back multiples in execution speed. Because the team wasn’t stopping to fix what could have been foreseen. They were executing against a plan that accounted for what was coming.
What planning actually looks like
Planning is not a Gantt chart. It’s not a slide deck. It’s the discipline of asking — before you start — what could go wrong, what resources you actually need, what the decision points are, and what you’ll do when conditions change.
It means defining clear targets so the team knows what done looks like. It means running a risk assessment so you’re not discovering problems under pressure. It means building a timeline that reflects reality rather than optimism.
Failing to plan is planning to fail. That’s not a motivational poster — it’s an operational efficiency statement. Every hour not spent planning at the start will be paid back in multiples during execution.
The businesses that get this right
The founders and MDs I’ve worked with who scale most effectively share one habit: they slow down before they speed up. They invest in structure — clear plans, defined processes, honest risk assessment — before they push for growth.
That structure is what allows them to move fast without generating the kind of operational chaos that eventually becomes a business bottleneck. They use their heads first. So they rarely have to use their legs.
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