Applying Military Strategy and Tactics to Business
Applying Military Strategy and Tactics to Business
Preamble
During the late 80s and early 90s, much of the predominant management philosophy involved directly applying classical military strategy to business. Sun Tsu was regularly quoted at Board meetings and on Wall Street and books like On War and Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun were among the most popular business books available.
At the time, I wasn’t a big subscriber to the idea that lessons from military conquests and failures could be readily applied to making a business successful. Perhaps it was that I couldn’t get my head around morphing one of Sun Tsu’s many principles of warfare into something that I could adopt as a leader or manager . . .
“Camp in high places, facing the sun. Do not climb heights in order to fight. So much for mountain warfare.” - Sun Tsu, The Art of War
Huh?
Maybe it was that the black and white nature of warfare, with real life death and destruction that made it difficult for me to draw comparisons with the gray-ness of business strategy and its inherently longer feedback loop. Or, it could have been because mapping strategy directly to success or failure discounts the value of the quality of implementation. As a strong believer in the power of strong management, I believe that top-notch execution often trumps good strategy. As I see it, a good strategy poorly implemented will lose to a lesser strategy that is well implemented (that ought to elicit some strong opinions . . . ).
For whatever reasons I struggled with using centuries of military wisdom in conducting business in the past, my recent re-reading of excerpts from books by a few of the great military historians - B.H. Liddel Hart, Carl von Clausewitz and, of course, Sun Tsu, among others, has got me re-thinking about the application of what armies and empires have learned about beating the crap out of the other guy.
Of course, from the cheap seats, anyone can read an excerpt from the writings
Preamble
During the late 80s and early 90s, much of the predominant management philosophy involved directly applying classical military strategy to business. Sun Tsu was regularly quoted at Board meetings and on Wall Street and books like On War and Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun were among the most popular business books available.
At the time, I wasn’t a big subscriber to the idea that lessons from military conquests and failures could be readily applied to making a business successful. Perhaps it was that I couldn’t get my head around morphing one of Sun Tsu’s many principles of warfare into something that I could adopt as a leader or manager . . .
“Camp in high places, facing the sun. Do not climb heights in order to fight. So much for mountain warfare.” - Sun Tsu, The Art of War
Huh?
Maybe it was that the black and white nature of warfare, with real life death and destruction that made it difficult for me to draw comparisons with the gray-ness of business strategy and its inherently longer feedback loop. Or, it could have been because mapping strategy directly to success or failure discounts the value of the quality of implementation. As a strong believer in the power of strong management, I believe that top-notch execution often trumps good strategy. As I see it, a good strategy poorly implemented will lose to a lesser strategy that is well implemented (that ought to elicit some strong opinions . . . ).
For whatever reasons I struggled with using centuries of military wisdom in conducting business in the past, my recent re-reading of excerpts from books by a few of the great military historians - B.H. Liddel Hart, Carl von Clausewitz and, of course, Sun Tsu, among others, has got me re-thinking about the application of what armies and empires have learned about beating the crap out of the other guy.
Of course, from the cheap seats, anyone can read an excerpt from the writings