From Battlefield to Boardroom: Winning Management Strategies for Today's Global Business

Rating:
Summary: Ten War Strategies that Often Apply in Business
Review: This book's focus is on the idea of strategy as it is used to determine how opponents deploy and apply their resources against one another. The book superbly describes ten strategies that are often taken from the war context and applied to business.

To get a sense of what these strategies are, let me mention a few. One of the opening examples is of General MacArthur's campaign in the Pacific. He identified an island-hopping approach that would avoid battles on as many places as possible, while obtaining air and sea superiority to bomb and blockade both islands to be attacked and those to be starved out with as much impunity as possible. Thus, he was able to roll-back the Japanese advances with as few troops and casualties as possible. A less good strategy would simply have attacked each island in turn with ground troops brought in by the Navy. The other examples include Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Patton's landing in North Africa, Moses preparing to enter the Promised Land, Desert Storm, the US, UK, and USSR alliance in World War II, rebuffing Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the Spartans at Thermopylae, Sherman's march through Georgia, Viet Nam, and special forces in Somalia. I thought that each example was well-chosen, clear, and interesting.

The book also contains many worthwhile quotes, and even an extra section of them at the end. "There is no such thing as a fair fight." SEAL Commander T.L. Bosiljevac

The book mostly cites well-known, large company examples to make the connection to business strategy. The author argues that "what is new is the increasing introduction . . . of strategy into the business arena." Although business now speaks the language of war quite often ("Annihilate the Red Army of Coca-Cola"), I think that is more a function of many business leaders have gotten their first leadership training in the military than of military thinking dominating business strategy. Also, people applied these strategies in business, long before they spoke about them in military terms. So I would argue that what we really have is a rise in the use of military strategy as a metaphor in business.

Dr. Laurie is not sympathetic to other metaphors for strategy. "Much silliness has been written of late that encourages kissy-kissy, I win, you win, we all win approaches to business."

The weakness to thinking of strategy solely in terms of competition is that it can draw focus away from better serving customers. As Peter Drucker reminds us all, "The purpose of a business is to create a customer."

This book will be of the most use to people who are in industries where the cast of competitors rarely shifts, few changes occur in the environment, and head-on attacks don't make much sense. To be helpful in more fluid environments, I suspect that the book would have had to focus solely around ten outstanding strategies of guerilla warfare instead.

I was pleased to see that the book does a fine job of putting strategy into context of having great people, a proper mission (something that most companies lack, even those with good-sounding mission statements), wonderful understanding of the current and future environment, superb execution of appropriate tactics, and fine communications. Research has shown that a fine strategy is not enough. Most of the challenge is in execution. But if you do a good job of executing the wrong strategy, that will harm you.

After you finish reading this book, can you think of other metaphors that can help you formulate more effective strategies? Some recent ones written about in business books have included improvisational theater, jazz, and judo. I wonder how families, politics, and emergency work could inform our choices, as well.

Use your resources in the best ways!

Rating:
Summary: Ten War Strategies that Often Apply in Business
Review: This book's focus is on the idea of strategy as it is used to determine how opponents deploy and apply their resources against one another. The book superbly describes ten strategies that are often taken from the war context and applied to business.

To get a sense of what these strategies are, let me mention a few. One of the opening examples is of General MacArthur's campaign in the Pacific. He identified an island-hopping approach that would avoid battles on as many places as possible, while obtaining air and sea superiority to bomb and blockade both islands to be attacked and those to be starved out with as much impunity as possible. Thus, he was able to roll-back the Japanese advances with as few troops and casualties as possible. A less good strategy would simply have attacked each island in turn with ground troops brought in by the Navy. The other examples include Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Patton's landing in North Africa, Moses preparing to enter the Promised Land, Desert Storm, the US, UK, and USSR alliance in World War II, rebuffing Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the Spartans at Thermopylae, Sherman's march through Georgia, Viet Nam, and special forces in Somalia. I thought that each example was well-chosen, clear, and interesting.

The book also contains many worthwhile quotes, and even an extra section of them at the end. "There is no such thing as a fair fight." SEAL Commander T.L. Bosiljevac

The book mostly cites well-known, large company examples to make the connection to business strategy. The author argues that "what is new is the increasing introduction . . . of strategy into the business arena." Although business now speaks the language of war quite often ("Annihilate the Red Army of Coca-Cola"), I think that is more a function of many business leaders have gotten their first leadership training in the military than of military thinking dominating business strategy. Also, people applied these strategies in business, long before they spoke about them in military terms. So I would argue that what we really have is a rise in the use of military strategy as a metaphor in business.

Dr. Laurie is not sympathetic to other metaphors for strategy. "Much silliness has been written of late that encourages kissy-kissy, I win, you win, we all win approaches to business."

The weakness to thinking of strategy solely in terms of competition is that it can draw focus away from better serving customers. As Peter Drucker reminds us all, "The purpose of a business is to create a customer."

This book will be of the most use to people who are in industries where the cast of competitors rarely shifts, few changes occur in the environment, and head-on attacks don't make much sense. To be helpful in more fluid environments, I suspect that the book would have had to focus solely around ten outstanding strategies of guerilla warfare instead.

I was pleased to see that the book does a fine job of putting strategy into context of having great people, a proper mission (something that most companies lack, even those with good-sounding mission statements), wonderful understanding of the current and future environment, superb execution of appropriate tactics, and fine communications. Research has shown that a fine strategy is not enough. Most of the challenge is in execution. But if you do a good job of executing the wrong strategy, that will harm you.

After you finish reading this book, can you think of other metaphors that can help you formulate more effective strategies? Some recent ones written about in business books have included improvisational theater, jazz, and judo. I wonder how families, politics, and emergency work could inform our choices, as well.

Use your resources in the best ways!