There are inspiring examples of strategy all around us. Some are explicit and self-proclaimed while others are hidden, or buried, in the fabric and patterns of the world. While the latter may turn out to be the most profound, the recorded thoughts of prior students of strategy can offer insights that can have more immediate application in our lives.
The richest source of explicit examples of strategy and its “experts” is the military. It is inevitable to start here. Given the stakes — the very survival of peoples and nations — it is unsurprising that it has received the most intense attention and has the greatest body of literature. It is where the very idea of strategy begins.
“Go toward the sound of the guns,” can apply both in battle, and in looking for lessons in strategy.
Perhaps the earliest acknowledged “master” of strategy was Sun Tzu, a Chinese general and philosopher who wrote The Art of War about 500 BCE. His ideas were unknown in the west until it was translated into French in 1772, and there is some evidence that Napoleon was influenced by Sun Tzu’s ideas. Among his most famous statements is, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” leaving one to wonder what he could have done with the internet.
While Napoleon was arguably one of history’s great strategists, it seems he “recorded” his strategy more often on the battlefield, than on paper. He is directly known only for little maxims like, “Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time, never.”
Napoleon’s strategies were observed by Karl von Clausewitz, the canny military theorist who famously declared that, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.”, His book, On War, is the magnum opus of the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
There are many other military “masters” to consider: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and his general Subatai, Nelson and Rommel, and even Seversky and Mitchell on how aviation and “air power” changed strategy. The value of these sources will be in deducing what is universal and relevant to other arenas.
Sometime after World War II, the language and paradigms of military strategy were adopted in the realm of commerce and business. Business moved from discussing efficiency and profits to market share and competitive advantage. And new concepts of strategy were developed, distinct from military precedents.
Peter Drucker wrote extensively about both the practical and philosophical concepts of business and management. Michael Porter advanced concepts of competition and the contest for resources. Tom Peters made his name in documenting and attempting to distill strategic concepts of management. The iconoclast, Henry Mintzberg, goes so far as to imply that strategic planning is irrelevant and that strategy is actually “emergent” and unplanned, perhaps self-evolving.
Remove the overt presence of guns and there are still many political strategists to consider, ranging from the deceptions of Machiavelli, through Bismarck and Karl Marx, to Gandhi’s non-violent resistance.
Competitive sports and games, often representing mock warfare, unsurprisingly borrowed much military language but, also, independently developed ideas about strategy. Examples span from chess master, Garry Kasparov to Wayne Gretzky’s – “Go to where the puck is going to be.”
Design, engineering, and architecture have created their own language and adages of how to employ a constrained resource to achieve an end. The architect, Louis Sullivan’s, concept of “Form follows function.” obviously has application in other endeavours. Buckminster Fuller looked deeply at the evolution of technology to use ever-less physical resources, or the “economy of means.”
And why were the Wright brothers the first to fly when Samuel Langley had far more resources and the financial support of the government?
In exploration, it’s worth considering why Roald Amundsen not only beat Robert Scott to the south pole, but lived to tell about it.
Biologists from Charles Darwin to E. O. Wilson have persuasively argued that cooperation has been more important than competition in evolutionary success. Is there a place for compassion in strategy?
And the recent science of “Biomimicry” is the study of how “strategies” and patterns that have emerged in the natural world can have application in human activities and designs.
There are many precedents to be found, if we have eyes to see.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
— Shakespeare, Hamlet