Business has gone through a dramatic transformation in recent years. So has warfare.
Every executive knows firsthand the daunting challenges
of the twenty-first-century business environment: rapid and disruptive change,
fleeting opportunities, incomplete information, an overall sense of uncertainty
and disorder. While military commanders have long faced such challenges on the
battlefield, meeting them has be come even more difficult in today’s world of
electronic weaponry, blurred battle lines, and amorphous enemies.
Military strategy, like business strategy, has had to
evolve in response to the changing environment. This has led to the growing
focus on an approach to armed conflict called maneuver warfare. Recognized as a
viable combat philosophy for the past 65 years, maneuver warfare risen to
prominence in the past decade because it is so well suited to today’s combat
environment. Although designed for the battlefield, the approach offers a novel
and useful way to think about business strategy, allowing executives to
capitalize on—rather than succumb to—the formidable challenges they now face.
Maneuver warfare represents—in the words of the United
States Marine Corps doctrinal manual, Warfighting—“a state of mind bent on
shattering the enemy morally and physically by paralyzing and confounding him,
by avoiding his strength, by quickly and aggressively ploiting his
vulnerabilities, and by striking him in a way that will hurt him most.” Its
ultimate aim is not to destroy the adversary’s forces but to render them unable
to fight as an effective, coordinated whole. For example, instead of attacking
enemy defense positions, maneuver warfare practitioners bypass those positions,
capture the enemy’s command-and-control center in the rear, and cut off supply
lines. Moreover, maneuver warfare doesn’t aim to avoid or resist the
uncertainty and disorder that inevitably shape armed conflict; it embraces them
as keys to vanquishing the foe.
Despite the oft-cited analogy between warfare and
business, military principles clearly can’t be applied wholesale in a business
environment. The marketplace is not, after all, a battlefield, if only because
lives aren’t at stake. That said, companies do compete aggressively even
viciously—for strategic advantage in a chaotic arena that is increasingly
similar to the modern theater of war.
Consequently, while the battle metaphor in some settings
may seem facile or ill considered, we believe concept of maneuver warfare is
directly relevant to business strategy, precisely because it has been developed
address conditions that in many ways mirror those faced by modern executives.
Furthermore, the approach—with its focus not on overpowering a rival but on
outflanking him, targeting his weaknesses, and rendering him unable to analyze
the situation—can help a company to achieve a decisive advantage with a minimal
deployment of resources. This is of particular interest in today’s business
environment, when many companies are hesitant to over-commit their resources.
The Nature of War
Warfare, in general, takes place on multiple levels. On
the physical level, it is a test of firepower, weapons technology, troop
strength, and logistics. At the psychological level, it involves intangibles
such as morale, leadership, and courage. At the analytical level, it challenges
the ability of commanders to assess complex battlefield situations, make
effective decisions, and formulate tactically superior plans to carry out those
decisions.
If these dimensions seem familiar to most business
executives, so too will the four human and environmental factors that,
according to Warfighting, shape military conflict. Friction is the phenomenon
that, in the words of the manual, “makes the simple difficult and the difficult
seemingly impossible.” The most obvious source of friction is the enemy, but it
can also result from natural forces such as the terrain or the weather,
internal forces such a lack of planning or coordination, or even mere chance.
by Eric K. Clemons and Jason A. Santamaria
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