When strategy loses its soul

Strategy, at its best, is one of humanity’s great gifts. It lifts our eyes when others are stuck in the mud of details. It helps us look ahead when most are wasting their days ruminating over the past, or maximizing returns in the present.

Strategists are big-picture people. They see patterns others miss, connections others fail to make, consequences others are too hurried or too blinkered to notice. Done well, strategy gives shape to the future instead of leaving us to drift into it.

And yet.

The current situation in much of the world—bombardments, invasions, sieges, retaliations—is fertile ground for strategic thinkers. They are in their element. What’s the bigger play for all these countries? What are they really up to? How will this play out, and who will finally emerge victorious?

And so we get “decapitation strategies”: remove the leadership in the hope that the organization is paralysed or begins to unravel. We get “asymmetrical responses”: avoid fighting on the enemy’s terms, and use indirect or unconventional methods that exploit the mismatch in strengths. And we get “shock and awe”: overwhelming force, speed, and psychological dominance designed to leave the adversary disoriented and unwilling to resist.

When someone wants to depict “strategy” in a visual—for a book cover, perhaps, or the first slide in a deck—what image are they most likely to use? Look around: it’s almost always a chessboard. The chess player sees the whole board and all the pieces, and constructs moves based on their connections. The chess player plays several moves ahead, foreseeing the reactions of more short-sighted opponents.

These visualizations, of strategy as a chess games, or as a contest played out on screens, tell us that it is all about pre-emptive strikes, unexpected countermoves, crippling blockades, and luring opponents into unseen traps. We revel in the sharp thinking, the cut and thrust, the nimble moves.

And we forget. In chess, and on screens, there is no real blood spilled. In the war games of real life, enormous physical and emotional carnage is unleashed. We are applying intelligence in the service of brutality.

This is what makes me ashamed to call myself a strategist. You cannot detach strategy from basic humanity and still retain a clear conscience. A thousand deaths are not just a result on your scorecard; they are lives ended, families ruptured, hopes destroyed.

When strategy is used for this sort of inhumane, cold-hearted gain, call it what it really is: calculated barbarity.

The last chapter of my book on strategy, Up & Ahead, asks what strategy is actually for. That question matters far beyond business. Strategy is not morally admirable just because it is intelligent. It is not redeemed by sophistication, nor cleansed by elegance. The test of strategy is not only whether it works, but what it serves.

If your strategy depends on deceit, exploitation, or manipulation, it deserves to come undone. And if your strategy goes further still, into the systematic annihilation of other human beings, then let us stop dressing it up as brilliance. It is not brilliance. It is abject moral failure.

If your strategy requires the crushing of the innocent, may every victory you claim turn bitter in your mouth. May the blood you spill outlive your triumphs, and may history name you not as brilliant, but as damned.

Strategy is a magnificent human faculty. But once it is severed from conscience, it curdles into something dark. A mind that can see far ahead, and feels nothing, is not a strategic mind to admire. It is a dangerous one to fear.

The true work of strategy is not to outwit and destroy, but to create conditions in which human beings can live, flourish, build, trade, learn, and hope. The highest strategy enlarges life.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

The finest strategy is not the art of defeating humans. It is the art of serving them.

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