Hello, young grasshoppers. Mr. Miyagi speaking. Today, you are training to use your head for something other than a target. Today, you are training to be agile to overcome bullies in your markets.

You must learn how to be flexible and efficient in the use of balance, leverage, and movement during fighting. Skill, technique, and timing are essential for success, not bullying. You must learn how to give way, rather than use force, to overcome a stronger opponent.

Success doesn’t mean being the strongest; success means developing oneself to the maximum extent possible and striving for perfection in order to contribute value to the world. Mr. Miyagi hates fighting, but likes martial arts. Because of martial arts, I don’t have to fight, see? If you understand this, then Mr. Miyagi has hope for you.

As an entrepreneur, executive, and provider of professional services, I’ve learned that judo principles can be applied to business leadership. Who among us hasn’t felt what it’s like to be put in a chokehold by a competitor? Or thrown to the mat by an unexpected change in the marketplace? Or held in an armlock by others in our organizations who are resistant to change?

When this happens, practice what I call “leadership judo,” which means turning your opponent’s strength into a weakness that eventually defeats him.

Businesses have a tendency to become comfortable doing the things that made them successful. They develop habits and rely on particular skills and strategies over and over again. Judo masters discover where an opponent’s reliance on a certain strength makes him vulnerable, then they turn that strength into the opponent’s fatal flaw.

Turn Strength into Weakness

For example, look what Japanese companies have done to American competitors. They saw that American businesses were driven by profit, so that our strength was in the high end of the market. The Japanese moved into the low end of the consumer market with low-priced products that had minimal features. Soon, the Japanese were leaders in copy machines, then consumer electronics, automobiles, and fax machines.

They turned our strength into a weakness and capitalized on the mass market. By the time they had achieved dominance in that part of the market, they had enough profit to take on the high-end market as well.

Another example is the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Apple. It began when two young engineers started Apple in their garage, without investors or any business experience. They wanted to create a personal-computer industry and dominate it, and in the process, they turned IBM’s strength in mainframe computers into a weakness.

But IBM threw Apple to the judo mat by teaming up with Microsoft, putting Windows software on its computers, and soon overtaking the PC industry. In just 30 years, the IBM-Microsoft dream of a PC (running on Windows software) in everyone’s home is a reality. In the 1990s, they turned Apple into a has-been company serving a small niche of the PC market.

Apple responded several years ago, proving once again that it has the sharp mind and agile moves of a judo master. By introducing the iPod, it turned the momentum of the entire technology industry back to Apple.

Apple Computer was recently ranked the number-one innovative company in the world by BusinessWeek, because it “delivers great consumer experiences with outstanding design; steady flow of new ideas that redefine old categories, such as music players; continuous evolution of business model and brand.” Microsoft earned the number-three spot on BusinessWeek’s list. (By the way, a hometown hero, 3M, was ranked number two.)

Be Agile

Apple recovered by looking for opportunities in the marketplace that competitors ignored—the heart of leadership judo. Microsoft’s market dominance and sheer mass enable it to utilize the brains and skills of many, many engineers and programmers, more than a smaller company like Apple can possibly have in its knowledge base. However, mass is also limiting, especially when the market demands a quick response to change.

Judo masters teach their students to be agile. If you practice leadership judo, that means teaching your organization to move quickly. The speed with which your business has to move today is faster than ever before. It’s no longer good enough to have the right products, the right prices, the right distribution, and the right markets. If you are just a little bit slower than the competition, you’ve lost.

To become more agile, business leaders must fight organizational gravity. The pull of organizations tends to make everyone in them focus on problem solving and reaction. Leaders must fight that gravitational pull and push their organizations to be opportunity focused. All organizations, especially successful ones, recognize that no product or process will perform effectively over a long time without modification and redesign. Eventually, everything becomes obsolete.

Sometimes all that’s needed to change a company’s focus from problems to opportunity is a change in the attitude of its leaders. Those who practice leadership judo ask questions such as, “What are the weaknesses that make us vulnerable?” “Where is our business out of balance?” and “What are we afraid of, and how can we turn it into an opportunity?” The answers to these questions will have you on the right track for realizing the full potential of your business.

Be Flexible

The worst cases of organizational gravity, hands down, are in government. Government’s inability to stop doing things that it doesn’t need to do anymore is at the crux of its problems. Other organizations heavy with bureaucracy, such as those in the health care system, are almost as bad. In a judo match, they are the big fat guy who gets easily thrown to the mat by the smaller, faster guy.

If you don’t believe that businesses have a tendency to hang on to yesterday, consider this: What’s the first reaction to the failure of a product or line of business? Throw more money at it!

Instead of wasting resources, become agile and flexible. Move scarce resources from areas of low productivity and poor results to opportunities for achievement. Decide quickly not to do the things that don’t make sense anymore. Reduce layers of bureaucracy, and empower all of your employees.

Find new perspectives to tackle old problems, and be open to learning from others. And have some fun while you’re at it. Work should not be so much work, after all, young grasshoppers!