How are you managing in this Vuca world? You have never heard of Vuca? That is possibly because we at the Financial Times tend to avoid this horrible acronym, which stands for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity”.

It has only ever appeared in the FT five times, twice in articles by writers from business schools. But consultants use it often, and you frequently hear it from company leaders.

Vuca has its origins in the United States military.

“The notion of Vuca was introduced by the US Army War College to describe the more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, multilateral world which resulted from the end of the cold war,” a paper by the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School says.

Created in the late 1990s, the acronym took off after the September 11 terrorist attacks and, according to the paper, “was subsequently adopted by strategic business leaders to describe the chaotic, turbulent and rapidly changing business environment that has become the ‘new normal’.”

I can see the attraction. It sounds daring and swashbuckling, operating in this supposedly perilous environment.

Many corporate leaders like the thought of themselves as military strategists. But Vuca is a vacuous concoction. The suggestion that its components are “the new normal” is misleading.

Business leadership has always been tough.

The challenges conjured by Vuca — competition from outside your own market and rapid technological change — have been around for decades.

In more than 30 years of writing about business I have never seen a time when company bosses have not felt assailed and vulnerable.

Yes, the disruption of online business has quickened since the millennium, but people have been talking about technology changing at “warp speed” since the 1980s.

Andy Grove, head of Intel, wrote his book Only the Paranoid Survive in 1996. That does not mean that the business environment never changes — it does, all the time — or that it does not require special skills to navigate.

But those skills, difficult though they are to master, have not changed in their essentials: paying attention to what customers are saying and buying, investigating new entrants from your established markets and outside, improving your products and trying out new ones, and recruiting and training people who support you in all this.

Is there anything really new and bewildering in modern management?

Yes, the international political environment.

Business has suffered from political ructions before: the oil price shock in 1973, in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, or having to respond to the demand for sanctions on apartheid South Africa, for example.

But in the decades after 1945, the world was largely comprehensible. There were three broad camps: the west and its allies, the Soviet bloc, and what was then called the third world or the nonaligned nations.

Most political and military conflicts slotted into that framework, with the west, or at least the US, supporting one side and the Soviet bloc the other, often with the backing of the supposedly nonaligned countries.

This was true of the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Today is far less comprehensible.

Russia is no longer communist but is still an enemy of the west. Its former satellites are market economies, but Poland and Hungary appear to be departing from western political norms.

Israel is still closely tied to the US, but also appears to be friends with Russia and, increasingly with Saudi Arabia.

China, now competing with the US for global economic dominance, is desperately hard to read. It is apparently market friendly but politically perilous, and western business people can find themselves in trouble for mysterious reasons.

UBS this week warned some of its staff against travelling to China after one of its bankers was told not to leave the country.

Saudi Arabia appeared to be becoming more open under its crown prince, Mohammed Salman, only to send businesses scurrying away from involvement after the apparent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Even the US under Donald Trump and the United Kingdom struggling with Brexit have become bewilderingly unpredictable.

This is business’s new normal: constant geopolitical upheaval.

If corporate leaders need advice on anything it is international relations — if they can find anyone who can explain what is happening. THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michael Skapinker is an associate editor and columnist at The Financial Times. He writes on business and society.