The Art of Strategy

Learning Creative Practices from the Great Strategists of the Past

Owen E. Hughes

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429849558
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business Strategy

Strategy is best understood not as a science, but as an art – one of universal applications that transcend situation or historical context. The principles that were successful in war and politics through history can have real and demonstrable applications in business and management.

Here, professor of strategy Owen Hughes helps practitioners and students to draw those parallels and to develop a profound and holistic understanding of strategy that will help them plan for, and achieve, success. Describing strategy as an intersection of five facets – purpose, capability, will, terrain and tactics – Hughes draws from colourful and dramatic examples from history, and clearly demonstrates how these tactics might be applied in your own life and work.

This book is an ideal strategy text for any practitioner, lecturer or student who tires of familiar strategy frameworks with limited scope.

1
THE ART OF STRATEGY

Introduction

There is much written and spoken about strategy, but much too that is misap-plied, misappropriated and may even be misleading. In common usage, the word ‘strategy’ is often used for relatively low-level plans, or for events that are without real strategic importance, instances that are tactical at best. Strategy is bigger than this; it is more comprehensive, more inclusive, more important.

Strategy looks ahead. Strategy is essentially about creating a future; using data, information and judgment, or other influences that have effects and consequences for that future. Strategy is a way of thinking, an art rather than a science. It refers to the big picture, not the small picture, the ultimate aim, the overall purpose, the very reason for being. Lower-level plans do have their utility and should not be discounted altogether; they are, however, of much greater utility when part of, but subservient to, an overarching strategy.

Creating and curating the future does not mean that strategy is akin to fortune-telling, futurology or magic. Done well, strategy is about the balance of probabilities, about being judicious. It is grounded and pragmatic. Rather than finding certainty in foreseeing the future, strategy is about creating a manageable set of possible futures for an organization or individual bearing in mind constraints of time, information uncertainty, organization and competence. The presence of a strategy ‘suggests an ability to look up from the short term and the trivial to view the long term and the essential, to address causes rather than symptoms, to see woods rather than trees’.¹

While the future cannot be foretold with exactitude, there are ways in which prior events, stories, theory, understandings of situation and context can be drawn upon so that the best choice is made despite inherent uncertainty.

There are many different aspects of strategy and different formulations as to what might be important. There are innumerable theorists of strategy, far too many to be mentioned or used. There are theorists of strategy, historians of strategy, users of strategy, menus of strategic plans and much more.² The basic argument here is that strategy is best understood in a simple model as the intersection of five facets, five aspects that impinge on strategy – purpose, capability, will, terrain and tactics. In brief, as all are detailed later: purpose is the ultimate aim of a strategy; capability the resources that can be brought to bear; will is the human factor to decide to proceed or not; terrain is the field of conflict; and tactics the lower-order actions aimed at bringing about the strategic purpose. It is argued that successful strategy occurs when these five facets – PCWTT – work together in a mutually reinforcing way, although there are, of course, situations where deficiencies in one facet can be overcome by superiority in another.

If there is misalignment – if, for instance, tactics are inconsistent with the overall purpose, or if capability and will cannot overtake constraints of terrain – a strategy is likely to fail. In some situations, different facets may be emphasized more than others. Terrain may not be a salient issue in some cases, capabilities and will may be equivalent between possible adversaries. But purpose is far more important than the other four facets; if purpose – the first facet – is unclear or unachievable, the outcome is bound to be poor even if other facets are strong.

An obvious question is how to illustrate this model of strategy, how to extrapolate from a particular aspect to a more general case. In what follows, the facets of strategy are illustrated by looking at events and situations that enable lessons can be drawn. If strategy is universal – an approach applicable to any context from business to government even to war – then examples can be chosen from events for which information is available.

Instances used here are selected and are chosen by how they relate to a particular theoretical point. There are many possible examples. The ones chosen here illustrate the PCWTT model in some way pointing to aspects of strategy. They are mostly high-level instances of international conflict and war for which information and historical discussion are readily available. Some illustrate a particular facet of the model – George Washington in the American Revolution is a case study in purpose; Julius Caesar for will – while others illustrate several facets. Some examples appear several times here. For instance, aspects of Japanese naval strategy in World War II have lessons for all five facets of the PCWTT model. Overall, though, the examples chosen are representative of a larger universe of strategy rather than being definitive or comprehensive.

Using examples such as these is not unusual. Military leaders often refer to history, for instance, Washington’s Fabian strategy referred to the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus in combatting Hannibal’s invasion of Roman Italy two thousand years before. In turn, Washington’s leadership is used and celebrated in studies of business a further two hundred years later.³ Many business leaders, notably in the 1990s, gained much from the wisdoms of Sun-tzu from even further back in history. Machiavelli enlivens his work with examples from his own time but also Roman times. Alexander the Great is often cited in terms of business strategy,⁴ even if time and a lack of information may make the lessons somewhat problematic and even anachronistic. Instances and events such as these are when strategy is at its most raw; elemental cases with serious consequences. It is argued here that lessons can be drawn about strategy from such stories, as strategy is a universal concept applicable to any sector.

What is strategy?

Strategy is one of those words everyone knows and uses, but often not that precisely. The relevant Shorter Oxford definitions of strategy are ‘the art of a commander-in-chief; the planning and direction of the larger military movements and overall operations of a campaign; … the art or skill of careful planning towards an advantage or a desired end’ and ‘in game theory, business theory etc, a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of opposing or competing participants’. The word derives from the Greek strategus (or strategos), meaning ‘a commander-in-chief, general, or chief magistrate at Athens and in the Achaean league’, and is a combination of stratos, which meant ‘army’ (or more correctly an army spread out over the ground), and agein, meaning ‘to lead’ (Shorter Oxford Dictionary). The Greek word for strategy and its distinction from tactics goes back at least as far as the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE,⁵ although Freedman argues that the word only came into general use at the start of the nineteenth century.⁶

These definitions all involve planning and, implicitly, this means planning for some future event or desired condition. The ‘art of a commander-in-chief’ points to higher order thinking than the day-to-day, while ‘the larger military movements and overall operations of a campaign’ reinforce the idea that strategy is a higher-order function. And, ‘the art of careful planning towards an advantage or desired end’ neatly summarizes how strategy is used here. Strategy is purposive thought and action towards a desired end, as Freeman argues:

The essence of strategy is the effort to gain and retain the initiative, and to minimize the effects of chance. Strategy unites foresight and determination. It combines capabilities with opportunities to achieve broad, predetermined ends through skillful maneuver that minimizes costs.⁷

There is much in this view. Strategy is used to minimize chance and costs, while combining ideas of capability, opportunities and predetermined ends brings in much of the PCWTT model used here. A general argument is that strategy is best seen as a way of thinking and should not be confined to one field or another. Despite this general point, though, there are distinct usages in military strategy, in game theory and business. These are to be looked at even as strategy is to be seen as a unified concept.

Military strategy

The military usage of strategy is where the term derives and where it is still much used. For Clausewitz, a Prussian general, historian and theorist from the early nineteenth century:

Strategy is the employment of the battle to gain the end of the War; it must therefore give an aim to the whole military action, which must be in accordance with the object of the War; in other words, Strategy forms the plan of the War, and to this end it links together the series of acts which are to lead to the final decision, that, is to say, it makes the plans for the separate campaigns and regulates the combats to be fought in each.⁸

Strategy is a higher function linking the separate campaigns, which also need to be part of the object of the war itself. Like all strategy it is about the relationship of ends to means and achieving a result. It is purposive, deliberate and goal-directed. It is not random. As resources are always limited, strategy allows for prioritization in order to best pursue whatever the overall objective might be.

From this we derive the useful distinction between strategy and tactics, with strategy referring to the overall conduct of a conflict as opposed to tactics, the day-to-day conduct of operations. Clausewitz makes this distinction quite clearly, arguing that ‘tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy the use of engagements for the objects of the war’.⁹ While there is a difference it may be of level rather than kind; tactics and strategy should be aligned, with strategy the overall goal and tactics the means employed to get there.

Strategy and tactics are not always aligned. It is not unknown for a tactical battle or series of battles to be lost but for the overall strategy to prevail. During the American Revolution, as will be discussed later (chapter 2), George Washington was renowned for losing battle after battle, for running away, and for failure. He should be seen, however, as a strategist of genius and his undoubted mistakes of tactics should not take away from this more general point. Despite losing many of the battles he found himself in, he maintained the clear purpose of keeping an army in being and ultimately prevailed.

Not all generals regard strategy as crucial for warfare. US Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman said of strategy: ‘What is strategy? Common sense applied to war. You’ve got to do something. You can’t go around asking corporals and sergeants. You must make it out in your own mind’.¹⁰ But Sherman does himself a disservice here; his work as a general shows quite outstanding strategic ability. The mar...