Re-Thinking Strategy

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physical finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus politics on the notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens we are not as endlessly manipular ball and as predictable as your effective strategy the wood itself goes back to the Greek strategist the art of the general it hadn't really been used at least in the Western world until the end of the 18th century partly because of the Enlightenment and an interest in how to describe ideas and practice that would allow you to show that reason can be important even in that most unruly of human affairs war it came into being but then I think was given a tremendous push by Napoleon by the Napoleonic Wars and the center something bigger and different was going on and this military genius Napoleon seemed to understand it better than anybody else and that needed to be explained in the principles behind that could give you a clue as to how future military campaigns should be organized there were laws there are principles that work the guided strategy not long after this Napoleonic period professional revolutionaries who came into being in the 1830s looked back at some of these ideas read the literature that Agenor had been generated around Napoleonic strategy and started to try to apply it to revolutionary strategy so you have another strand that comes in from about that period and those of you who are familiar with for radical politics know all of the arguments that were set in motion of that period haven't stopped and then you have the the third wave which comes in much later when really not until the early 1960s do you find business leaders the mode writing for them starting to talk about the need for a strategy and actually at that point the literature on strategy takes off there's a sort of X but menschell curve of books on strategy and then of course this that moves into all aspects of life there's no human activity however intimate now that doesn't seem to need a strategy of some sort so that you could have child-rearing strategies strategies for finding partners strategies for your tax returns and one of the interesting questions to me is how do you put bounds on that how do you describe a strategic activity in a way that it's not just a simple way of talking about thinking for our head or working out what I need to do next do you dignify every deliberation as a strategy each of these aspects bring in some aspect of my life most of my working life has been spent on military issues I started on nuclear strategy which is in some ways the the harder strategic discussion of war but before that as an undergraduate and even as little bit as a graduate I was very engaged as with the radical political debates of the late 1960s when these issues seemed terribly important and being a pragmatic sort of chap I worried continually continuously about how it could ever be that these wonderful ideas that my colleagues were espousing and went to the streets to demonstrate about could ever be turned into practice and then as happens in the life I end up as part of senior management in the university and ending up with strategy in my title so actually as a matter of practice have had to try to work out how an organization develops a strategy and in all of these different areas skepticism about what strategy could do for you had crept in quite quickly with the with the on the revolutionary side but perhaps more gradually on the other side in each of the areas I've described the surge of interest in strategy reflected a belief that somehow this was a way by which bright intelligent well-informed leaders could control events how they could face all sorts of challenges in adversity and come out on top because somehow these under steeple understood what needed to be done what could be done better than others I mentioned already the Napoleonic strategies the first great interpreter of strategy not Clausewitz who came a little afterwards but Germany the Swiss Germany he was with the French never really throughout a very long life moved away from the view that if the certain principles were followed then the clever general the general of genius could get to the decisive victory which would win the war it was a theory of battle and decisive battles but is based on optimism that an enemy could be defeated and once the enemy was defeated then the state the enemy state could be subjugated Clausewitz who was probably still the greatest theorist of war was a little bit more skeptical but still he too was taken by this idea of the possibility of the decisive battle and you can see this idea not withering during the 19th century but getting more and more of a hole as particularly the Prussian general staff who were towards the end of the century more and more successful could not really think in any other terms but how they would win the war quickly because they knew a long war would be to their disadvantage by having a clever strategic plan yeah by this time by the end of the 19th century all the reasons why we know it is difficult for a clever strategic plan always to succeed that become apparent they become parent even by the time of the fall of Napoleon they'd become apparent in the in the Peninsular campaign as militias appeared which kept on interrupting the work of the French armies in in Spain and eventually work with Wellington to have their defeat there they were very evident in the Borodino campaign about which Tolstoy wrote not wholly accuracy but it's noteworthy that Tolstoy used Borodino as essentially to challenge the whole idea of the possibility of strategy house effects appears in war and peace tanam not wholly flattering light and there's great skepticism about these German ideas of a science of strategy as to what they could achieve in Borodino demonstrated the problems the napoleon faced first with not fighting not fighting when he'd wanted to fight having to go right into Russia to meet the Russian army defeating the Russian army but not sufficiently for it to have to plead for mercy the Russian army could fight another day many goes to Moscow the capital city the the symbol or of the state the tank Moscow but he can't stay there because it's on fire and the population has left so he has to go home and we know what happened then during the course of the 19th century you have the example of the American Civil War which demonstrates how these things can turn into quite bloody battles of attrition even before the First World War which undermined forever the possibility or their or confidence that with the right strategy you could be sure of victory right up to this period but and some extent beyond this idea of the possibility of understanding strategy would allow you to control events and not get yourself into mess still had to hold and you may have seen even recently in in the press did one of my colleagues at university Hugh strode has been arguing the problem is is a lack of strategic Thank You Vernon who had better strategies Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't happened the way they did but in a world can question whether the strategy was at fault or whether actually the strategies themselves were always going to be difficult to implement with revolutionary strategy again there was a an optimism that you can see in Marx and his followers about what the masses were going to be able to do the inevitability of their growing strength and seriousness of purpose the polarization that was going to come and the question was what was going to be the role of the intellectuals and the professional revolutionaries when the moment came the revolution was the equivalent of the decisive battle it was going to be the same stunning moment when you have a transformation from one order to another everything was going to be different after the Revolution come the revolution but again the experience eventually told that there were other ways by which the masses might try to meet their objectives the reformists the social democrats saw the virtues of elections lost interest in revolutions lest they appear too dangerous again the first world war undermined the whole notion of a class interest superseding a national interest when all the socialist parties of the second international went back and supported their our nations the war emember with business strategy - a lot of the original business strategy was based actually on the needs of the big American corporations in particular General Motors it was about how these big corporations which had almost reached the limits of their market share because of antitrust legislation how do they continue to be profitable and as pushed strategic thinking in words it was about the organization of the enterprise as much about us about how you deal with the external environment you can trace a lot of the origins of thinking about before they actually business strategy before they actually used the word strategy to a different set of problems but relates to my the previous discussion was about how to deal with the labor unions or whether it's of Taylorism time and motion studies which started before the first world war or the interwar discussions of the human relation school is really about how you deal with labor unrest but by the 50s that didn't seem to be the issue anymore it was about how the corporation could grow and it didn't really even deal with the issues of competition it was only as American corporation started to be unnerved by the arrival of serious competition from Europe from Germany but most of all from Japan that the literature began to change in turn and try to address this new set of problems and that confidence about the ability to control events from the perspective of corporate America of the 1950s is gradually eroded but what you have again is a series of authors coming forward with propositions about this is the way forward and I think business strategy more so that military strategy or political strategy has suffered from what's often called the gurus those who come up with a big new idea that will revolutionize the way you do business and ensure growth and seeing off your all your competitors Peter Drucker who was some of the first great business strategists said to what about the gurus he's sometimes described as the first guru said they used the word guru because charlatans too long to fit on a headline and I discovered there's a whole academic literature about fads and fashions and strategy which goes through the speed with which these are taken up and eventually dropped and ask the question why did serious executives who were not stupid fall for this each time to which one answer is you rarely lose your job by following a fashion and indeed if your seem to be bucking the trend going against the trend you can't lose your job so being part of a crowd in that sense could be helpful so in all these areas actually strategy never quite fulfills its original promise and what I'm trying to do I think is to point out that maybe we need to think about what strategy can do for you that's that question in a slightly different way the word strategy now to be strategic tends to mean to be long term to have a keen sense of objectives to have a clear sense of how you get from where you are at the moment to where you really would like to be and that sort of thinking can be very valuable but in practice it's also very difficult and flawed for a number of reasons a strategy is not synonymous with a plan plans can be very useful especially in those things you can control but when you're dealing with other human beings who are willful in their own way who have their own needs their own objectives even if they're notionally on your side even if they're your employees but certainly if they're your competitors or your enemies then it's going to be highly unlikely that a plan is a sequence of events that takes you from one point to another point in a very predictable process is going to be realized something is going to happen the great Prussian strategist who believed in clans nonetheless Edvin bulk no no plan survives contact with the enemy my favorite quote from this which comes from Mike Tyson everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth but it's the same basic theme Eisenhower once remarked that plans are useless planning is essential and I think that's true the process of thinking ed is highly useful but my suggestion is that actually most good strategy is based not on some notional endpoint but in the problem at hand what actually is the problem you're trying to solve in answering that question you may want to think about where you where you would like to be but a lot of the problem at hand it is a pretty defensive one because somebody else has taken the initiative in war if you've been attacked victory may seem a good idea but a better idea is survival that's the first priority then you may be able to start to think about where else you'd like to go so just as a matter of practice I think good strategy starts with the here and now and it's about getting to the next stage now it's important to keep that in mind because actually the idea of an endpoint which is captured by the idea of the decisive battle or the revolution is that that's it the problem sold you you've won your battle you you've had your revolution but actually all set of new problems are starting and how you've got to that point will affect how you deal with the aftermath you defeat your opponent but then you've got to run somebody else's state you win an election you've got to govern the country you have a you have a revolution you've got to implement the new order you manage to take over you've got to merge two companies and unless you've thought those things through or prepared for the next set of questions you're going to face you're going to be at a bit of a loss so the idea of the end point the ultimate objective is always misleading in this sense I would see strategy which has its own links with drama you can think of it as sort of a story written in the future tense about how things might develop it's not a three-hour play it's a soap opera one thing follows another and if you view it in those terms then strategy Beeker a continual process of updating and responding to event now the thing that makes for the the easiest and most successful strategy is simply being stronger than everybody else it's an obvious point but it often gets missed if you've got more resources then you really ought to win and if you don't you've probably screwed up pretty badly there's this great line from Ecclesiastes about the race doesn't always go to the most Swift or the fight doesn't always go to the most strong but Damon Runyon had the important Rider they're the ones to bet on most of the time the race does go to the most Swift and the battle does go to the most strong but it's not very interesting there's not much intellectual effort in working out how to apply superior resource so in practice a lot of the interesting strategy which is why revolutionary strategy so interesting so futile is the underdog the weakest party how can the the weakest party gain strength which is why I think some sue is so beloved of contemporary strategist this Chinese sage from 500 BC who wrote on the art of warring with great aphorisms it's it's it's certainly worth reading but it's basically about being cleverer than your opponent if you can't outfight them you can outwit them who's not going to enjoy the idea that they're going to be cleverer than everybody else and and improve this in in some great contests or other and it's fine until you meet somebody else who's also read some suit but basically if you're we care you want to appear stronger if you're stronger you want to appear weaker if you're going on the attack you must make it look like you're going on the defense if you've got defensive everybody's got the same idea you can never engage at all this is a role for deception and craftiness and keen intelligence and being smart in all of this but to my mind if you look back as to the basis of a lot of success when you're not starting from strength its coalition building finding a partner finding an ally it may be difficult it may involve awkward compromises but actually that's as often as not the best way to go about things so to conclude the history of strategy is to some extent a history of disillusionment it's a history of attempts to set up scientific ways of thinking about the future that will guarantee certain sorts of results that have always fallen short but in the process a lot of very interesting ideas come out and it focuses your mind on two issues of agency and context and so on in ways that if you not thinking strategically you may never come across if you're aware of that then your strategy you'll be being a good strategist will get you somewhere as long as you don't think it's gonna solve all your problems the relationship between the notion of strategy and the notion of uncertainty sometimes we see strategy as a way of coping with uncertainty as it were living with uncertainty and sometimes we see it as a way of resolving uncertainty removing uncertainty it sounds to me as though you're a supporter of the former rather than the latter view I think we conceptualized this issue more clearly now than we did in the past but this was a way by which you could remove uncertainty from your calculations was always one of the hopes and it's very strong if you read some of the literature around the managerial revolution of the 50s and 60s that we've now got a way of achieving a sort of stability in our operations that has eluded those in the past in the same way former Chancellor's have talked about ending the boom-and-bust cycle but somehow we've cracked a problem that is eluded people in the past and they haven't because in the end things happen that you're not prepared for a new get caught out or there's a complacency develops that sowed the seeds of it's its own destruction so definitely it's I'm about coping with uncertainty recognizing uncertainty but in no sense overcoming you

Channel: RSA

Views: 29,720

Keywords: the, rsa, Lawrence Freedman, Matthew Taylor, strategy, war, The RSA

Id: os0hbq84lrs

Length: 22min 24sec (1344 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2014