再Strategy2/2, November 2nd 2013 P80 (書評「戦略」)
Sir Lawrence examines this idea in three main forms. The first is the military sort, from Clausewitz to nuclear game theory and the rise of asymmetric warfare today. The second is ゛strategy from below゛, which looks at political varieties, particularly those of 19th-century professional revolutionaries such as Karl Marx, who saw themselves as the general staff of the downtrodden. And the third is ゛strategy from above゛, which examines the development of strategy in business, mainly a late-20th-century phenomenon, at least in its most self-conscious form. In all three spheres strategy is seen as the ways get a decisive and thus lasting result. As this long book, full of anecdote and illustration, unfolds, this is the question that bothers the author the most. The idea of knockout military victory keeps getting knocked down. Whether it is Napoleon's victory at Wagram, the early success of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, Hitler's blitzkrieg in 1940 or the rapid defeat of Iraqi force in 2003, all turned into long wars of attrition because the other side refused to realise it had been beaten. In modern times faith in the pursuit of decisive victory has been undermined by the overwhelming mutual destructive power of nuclear weapons and the frustrating messiness of counter-insurgency operations. The same is true in politics and business：initial success is hardly ever decisive, Sir Lawrence argues. If you win power, you still have all the problems of trying to govern；if you have a run of success with some great products or an innovative business model, it does not mean you will stay on top for ever. Strategy, it turns out, is really about trying to work out in a sensible way how to get from one stage to the next. With each stage a new set of problems has to be negotiated before you move beyond it. There is no end point：strategy is not simply a grander name for a plan, something that moves you forwards in predetermined steps. As Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century German field-marshal, put it：゛No plan survives contact with the enemy.゛Or Mike Tyson, still more pithily：゛Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth.゛A strategy that starts with objectives and works backwards is one that is likely to faiL A lot of strategy these days, especially in fashionable business books, depends on using narrative both to explain a proposed course of action and recruit support for it. But stories taken out of context and conveniently edited can be an unreliable guide. Sir Lawrence concludes that it may be better to look at strategy as a form of script, albeit one which incorporates the possibility of chance events, which attempts to anticipate the interactions of many players over a long time and which is open-ended. The climax that concludes a normal drama is denied the strategist, who is more like the writer of a long-running soap opera, with its myriad twists and turns. The sobering lesson after 630 pages of wide-ranging erudition and densely packed argument is that although it is unusally better to have some kind of starategy than not, unless you are prepared to adapt it as circumsdances change it is unlikely to do you much good.
