Friday, November 22, 2013

The Tyranny of Strategy

The Magazine - December 2013


by Tim Sullivan
Satan was rhetorically gifted enough to persuade a third of the angels to turn against God. He was charismatic enough to raise his troops’ morale in the face of their first defeat. He was sage enough to persuade his captains to continue the fight using his plan. He was cunning enough to trick the ever-vigilant guardians of Heaven, sneak into the Garden of Eden, and corrupt humanity. And he is, throughout John Milton’s Paradise Lost, by far the most interesting character, a vivid contrast to the pedantic, boring God the Father.
But Satan didn’t think things through. He neglected to develop a framework for understanding the world that would help guide him and his followers, and he conveniently forgot that he was, after all, fighting the Almighty. When he began his rebellion, he was already doomed.
What Satan lacked was a strategy. Maybe he should have called McKinsey.
Satan-as-failed-strategist is not my idea. It belongs to Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies at King’s College, London, and the author of a new doorstop of a book, Strategy: A History. Its publication provides us with an opportunity to step back and think about how the idea and practice of strategy have affected—and increasingly infiltrated—our lives.
MBA programs have been teaching strategy to future executives since Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration opened its doors, in 1908. The 1960s saw the rise of consultants who sell us their strategic services, and they’ve proliferated in the years since. We’re awash in books on the topic, too: Amazon lists 672 hardcover business titles with the keyword “strategy” published this year, up from 637 in 2012, 446 in 2003, 250 in 1993, and 55 in 1983.
Strategy seems to have attached itself, barnaclelike, to everything. Don’t just plan—develop a strategic plan. Don’t just open a Twitter account—adopt a social media strategy. Tired and stressed? Hone your work/life strategy.
We decry those who, like Satan, act without a strategy. Their behavior is merely a gambit, a trick, a ploy—admirable in its riskiness, perhaps, but fundamentally without substance. Even if it turns out well, it’s not replicable and therefore provides no guide for future action. Going to work without a strategy is like showing up without your trousers. As a consequence, the very idea of strategy threatens to become meaningless even as it overwhelms us. So perhaps it’s time to examine its roots and resurrect and prescribe its meaning, or at least its pieces. Freedman’s engaging portraits of some of history’s nontraditional strategic thinkers help us do just that.
John Milton—someone who rarely (never?) shows up in strategy books—is a good place to start. His point in retelling the story of humanity’s fall from grace was to reinforce the idea of free will in the face of Calvinists, who thought of salvation, and indeed of all history, as predetermined by God. Strategy, then, rests on the belief that we all have the power to effect an end, to change the world.
It must also posit a vision for the future state of the world. In war this is easy, or at least appears so: to have triumphed over the enemy. But ideally, as 19th-century German strategist Carl von Clausewitz argued, the threat of engagement might be enough to bring an opponent to the bargaining table in a weaker position—war, after all, being the continuation of policy by other means.
Strategy requires a reasonably accurate framework for understanding how the world works so that actions can be planned accordingly. Karl Marx’s dialectic, for example, serves this purpose well. If the goal is the freedom of the proletariat, one has to envision how capital and labor interact, and from there take steps to overturn the current order. Without a framework, the strategist acts in the dark, unable to anticipate consequences.
Strategy must also account for the constraints that our beliefs can put on our actions. As Freedman points out, the Greeks celebrated Odysseus’s strategic trickery; it was his signal virtue. But the Romans decried it. For them, achieving victory by any means necessary fell outside the realm of acceptable behavior. That constraint limited their ability to think through strategic actions—no trickery for them.
Gandhi, by contrast, was able to see past traditional constraints and take effective action through unconventional means—in his case, nonviolence in the face of British power—to win the day. His knowledge of the dynamics of world politics gave him the conviction to see his gambit (can we call it that?) through to the end.
Although it allows us to construct this useful primer on strategy fundamentals and is chock-full of intriguing stories, Freedman’s book says very little about the execution of strategy, about how to follow the paths of these master strategists. He says his purpose is to “provide an account of the development of the most prominent themes in strategic theory.” And he does cover the rise of traditional business strategy. But is a history of the thinking of strategy, not the doing of it, helpful?
Performance, after all, is what counts. Fame, glory, and the chance to be featured in a book like Freedman’s come only to those strategists who step out of the world of theory into the world of action. Execution is the final element of strategy, the meat and fiber in an otherwise bloodless enterprise. Freedman fails to address it, practically speaking.
The real reason strategy is a tyrant is not that it’s a craft that requires all the elements I’ve listed above but that it’s iterative and continuous. Getting it wrong leads to a definitive end. Napoleon, despite his brilliance, ended up first on the island of Elba and eventually in the grave. Such a fate awaits even the most successful strategists.
Tim Sullivan is the editorial director at Harvard Business Review Press.

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