If dealing with wuli–shili–renli is whatpragmatic managers do, how to do it? Readers familiar with the literaturewould say this question is about strategy process. We agree, but with animmediate qualification: pragmatically speaking, process cannot be properlyunderstood if separated from contexts or contents – who you are,where you come from, what you want to achieve.

In previous chapters, we posited that pragmatic strategies usually emergefrom purposefully guided, multi-path evolutionary processes and tend to becontingent, consequential, continuous, courageous, collective andco-creative. While such a view is useful in describing what practically wisestrategies look like, the normative question for managers on-the-spot,confronted with an urgent mess, remains: how to do it,here-and-now?

Rather than supplying a proven methodology, x-step procedure or y-dimensiongrid, we shall present a pragmatic mode of strategising: timely balance. Weshall begin by making a distinction between timely balance and the‘golden mean’. Popular interpretations of the ‘goldenmean’ will be shown to be theoretically problematic and unhelpful inpractice. In contrast, timely balance, which embodies the Confucian ideal ofpragmatism-upon-time, emphasises getting business right in unfoldingcircumstances. Instead of seeing strategies as determined by antagonisticopposites, pragmatism takes human experience as consisting ofinterdependent, reciprocal, generative companions.