The Art of War is dead?
Since the beginning of the business administration science its theories were entangled with war analogies. One of the most mentioned books of the past decades, in fact, was “The Art of War”, written more than 2000 years ago by the Chinese general Sun Tzu.
I have always been fascinated by war stories, ancient battles and military strategies. This is also part of the reason that led me to start working inside the corporate world. During the Roman empire one could join the army, advance gradually and become a general who would then have its own war standard, its commanders and use cleverly crafted strategies to defeat its enemies.
In our modern society things have changed, but not completely. You can still join a corporation (or even create yours), advance gradually and become the CEO. Once you arrive there you will also have your own war standard (the company logo) your commanders (managers) and while you will not be able to kill the enemies, if you are smart enough you will drive them out of business.
Some people, however, are starting to claim that the “The Art of War” inside the business world is dead. Over the last years the book “Bhagavad Gita”, which represents the base of the modern Hinduism, gained a lot attention from managers around the world. This book, as opposed to Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”, defends cooperative and altruistic ideals.
Do you think that in the future the business world will cease to behave similarly to the warfare?
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[Do you think that in the future the business world will cease to behave similarly to the warfare?]
No, for the simple reason that the metaphor is too compelling, and there are just too many similarities between “war” and “business.”
I think “sports” is another metaphor that will also continue to ring true in the business world.
I believe that the merger mania that we see in business in many industries are examples of companies getting bigger, fatter, slower and lacier. As history shows, all great empires fall at some time. I believe this is also true in the corporate world. Companies build them selves into empires that acquire smaller empires to sustain growth. I believe this opens up a lot of potential for smaller, leaner, faster companies, capable of changing the dancing rhythm of an industry into something fat empires just can’t do.
Christian, I agree 100%, I also believe that in the future we will see smaller companies challenging larger ones, technology will enable even single individuals to cover the whole world.
Roger, not only the metaphor is compelling, but it also has to do with men’s mind. I wish we could remove greed and the desire for power from men altogether, but I am not sure how long it will take for that.
The concept of leadership has continuously evolved over the years. Many, many years back people used the war metaphor for leadership. It was all about formulation of good strategy with limited information in the fog of war, and then getting effective execution through command and control. Some business publications and business leaders even today rely on that metaphor but it’s become increasingly outdated as you point out. Leadership then borrowed from the sports coach metaphor. The idea here was that if you take bright people with potential and coach them well, you can get teamwork that will elevate the performance of the organization in a way that you didn’t anticipate before. So leaders were expected to be great coaches who could get outstanding performances from average people.
We need to go beyond the coach metaphor to a collective transformational metaphor that is based on change being pulled rather than being pushed. This is important in the world of dispersed tacit roles that are knowledge rich as well as interaction rich. How do we get every employee to visualize a personal change gap that creates the bias for action? How do we make every employee feel empowered to make the adaptive change? How do we synchronize the adaptive change of lots of employees into the desired organizational change?
While Bhagavad Gita is getting attention, what we need is a good collective change metaphor. Some people have used animal analogies such as shackled elephants and loyal-to-the-leader buffaloes to represent outmoded management styles, quick and ever changing gazelles (doesn’t wait for trouble, it springs to action) to represent the new leadership paradigm but somehow they haven’t caught on. There is still a good book out there wiating to come out.
As I commented a couple of posts ago, war is the ultimate zero-sum game. Ironically though, economies are not. So how do we reconcile this apparent contradiction?
Well the business-as-war metaphor only describes a part of the whole story. It describes conflict. It misses cooperation.
Look to nature. There is war in nature, animals competing for scarce resources and territory, animals competing for mates and status, and a lot of violent conflict surrounding all this competition.
But nature also has another side. The waste of one is often fuel for another. A flower gives something of value to a bee who as a result provides the service of pollination to the flower. Cows eat grass, and thier resulting waste fertilizes new grass.
Nature is not a zero-sum game. The fower and the bee both win and therefore both flourish. Furthermore they exist within a much larger context where thier little wins combine with the little wins of other species so that the whole system flourishes.
It might sound a little flaky, but ecology is a much more robust and appropriate metaphor for business than war.
Doc Searls chimes in on the topic: http://www.searls.com/metaphor1.html
Cracks showing in the old conceptions of business:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/10/magazines/fortune/rules.fortune/index.htm
This isn’t to say that the war metaphor is wrong–merely that it is dangerously incomplete.
War has increasingly become more about business than of military strategy. Gone are the days of great political and military strategists; MacArthur, Churchill, and Roosevelt are dead; replaced by CEO’s who lack qualifications and political assertiveness to lead career military generals. As long as military leaders are recruited from the executive suites rather than the Pentagon or from the field the warfare metaphors will have less effectiveness.
Corporations today are more interested in getting along and differentiating than they are about eliminating the competition.
Great Strategy is the denominator for military genius, corporate and sports success.
As evidenced by the debacle in Iraq; strategic thinking is paramount. As long as our political leaders continue to put unqualified CEO’s into strategic posts the warfare metaphors will continue to fade from our perspective.
John, the nature metaphor is a great one also. Actually, although I have always been interested in studying the nature and its subtle yet efficient processes, few times I have sited to think how business could learn from it.
I mean just think about a bee hive, if only organizations could achieve such a degree of harmony, collaboration and precision.
Don, you say that “corporations today are more interested in getting along and differentiating than they are about eliminating the competition”. That is true to a certain extent, but do you think this is sustainable?
[…] The Art of War is dead? Since the beginning of the business administration science its theories were entangled with war analogies. One of the most mentioned books of the past decades, in fact, was The Art of War, written more than 2000 years ago by the Chinese general Sun Tzu. […]
The war metaphor is based on the scarcity mindset (zero sum game) If you are working to destroy something then you are not providing value. That is ultimate way to fail at satisfying customers.
You might succeed for a very short time by limiting variety of choices but that causes brittleness which results in extinction when the environment changes.
Since all decisions are based on information then the laws of information apply to business. Information wants to be free, to spread to multiply. War and scarcity models violate the basic physics of information. So in that regard the warfare metaphor is a losing mem.
Oddly enough I was writing on competition this week as well.