In the The Art of War, one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy, Sun Tzu outlines how a relatively small army can outmanoeuvre and beat a bigger opponent by adopting a flexible strategy.
Such a strategy highlights:
- the importance of positioning
- the physical conditions in the battlefield
- how commanders respond to changing conditions.
These concepts echo down the ages and are applied to business strategy.
The three pillars of an effective strategy
1. From a business perspective, establishing a distinct market position is the single most important challenge.
A clearly positioned company invariably trades on expertise of one kind or another. And a distinct position is often a platform to charge premium rates.
2. For me the second pillar in Sun Tzu’s treatise — battlefield conditions — equates to the market landscape. Marketing people often articulate the ‘big picture’ of external forces at play as Opportunities and Threats (from ye olde SWOT analysis).
3. Businesspeople who are nimble, and can switch tactics as conditions change around them, are often the winners.
And here there is a crucial linkage between Sun Tzu’s second and third strategy pillars. It is the concept of leaders being “in command and out of control” that I first read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the tale of a General Van Riper, and which is neatly summarised by Chris Grams:
… in an enormous military war game called the Millennium Challenge in 2002, Van Riper took command of the Red Team, playing the role of a rogue commander who broke away from the government of his Persian Gulf country and threatened US forces (the Blue Team). Rather than following standard military management protocol, Van Riper managed his team according to a philosophy he called “in command and out of control.”
Van Riper’s Red team won. The US war machine was not happy to have its massive preparation scuppered by a smaller, fast-thinking enemy. Here’s Van Riper talking about his approach:
… the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn’t depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward.
What does this mean for business?
Managers who are attuned to the market landscape, and given feedom to act without constantly requiring approval, will win out.
People running smaller businesses, choosing their battles wisely, can out-outmaneuvre bigger competitors. They do this by marshalling their marketing troops effectively and giving them the confidence to act.
Image from roguecouch.com
