| Laurie doesn't have time for companies that seek to win using outdated strategies "" for example, through lengthy wars of attrition, such as protracted price wars. They would find themselves so exhausted that their executives, their shareholders, and their market valuations won't be able to recover. |
| Speed is the essence. Today, Wall Street will not give a just-appointed CEO even two, let alone Moses' two score, years to change the strategic direction of a failing company. |
| Days after taking over, Hewlett Packard's CEO Carly Fiorina's top executives told her a major reorganisation would take at least a year. She ordered it to be done in three months. Reason: attrition works far too slowly as a mechanism to eradicate the status-quo mindset. |
| Several business books have been written using metaphors like improvisational theatre, jazz and judo. In comparison, there have been very few studies of military strategies as applied to global businesses in general. |
| This book does just that. After carefully studying various military strategies from Ancient Greece and Desert Storm and beyond, From Battlefield to Boardroom has presented 10 winning strategies taken from history's greatest battles and brought them to the business arena. |
| The strategies deal with attacking strength, concentration of forces, controlling a choke point, bringing change to a failing company, alliances, containment, combat-readiness, attacking weakness, patience and relentless attack. |
| But the dominant theme in the book is the attack-strength strategy. For, remember the Japanese maxim: to capture the baby tiger, you have to go into the mother tiger's lair. |
| Laurie has very vividly shown how every business strategy hammered out in today's corporate offices can be traced back to some battlefield in the past. The detailed examples are the most interesting part of the book. Check out some of them. |
| * In the early 1960s, Sam Walton began executing a strategy of opening retail stores in small towns not served by the then-Goliath Sears. When attacking Sears' weakness in small-town America, Walton was using the wisdom of ancient China's revered military philosopher Sun Tzu: to be certain to take what you attack is to attack a place the enemy does not protect. Sam Walton did just that, and the Wal-Mart empire was born. |
| * When Coca-Cola cajoled Venezuela's only bottler to defect from Pepsi and join its own ranks, it exploited the strategic lessons of one of history's most successful covert operations, the Israeli attack on Entebbe. The coup de main was marked by minutely detailed planning, lightning-fast execution, a shroud of secrecy, superb intelligence and the use of elite shock troops. |
| * Over 2,000 years ago, a small force of 300 Spartans held off Persia's King Xerxes and his 400,000-man army by controlling a narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae in northern Greece "" a crucial choke point. Microsoft has used this choke-point strategy by controlling a key technology, its PC operating system, to become one of the world's largest market cap companies. |
| It's a different matter, of course, that competitors have sought to choke Microsoft by attacking where it hurts the most "" the company's proprietary technology. Laurie is silent on this, but that's understandable as the book was written in 2001. The Indian edition is available only now. |
| But there is an important lesson here for companies like Microsoft. Given the fact that for every move there is a countermove, warfare practitioners in business must constantly be aware that rivals could be employing the very same concepts to shape the conditions of the competitive encounter in their favour. |
| Midway through the book, Laurie perhaps realises speed alone doesn't always work. That explains one of the most delightful chapters in the book on the strategy of patience where he draws parallel from Napolean's Russian invasion. |
| In June 1812, when Napolean crossed the Niemen river from Poland into Russia with a 450,000-man invading army, he found an evacuated Moscow "" the city's citizens had fled eastward taking with them foodstuffs and as much as of their personal belongings as they could. Napoleon set up his command post at a Kremlin palace, waiting for the Russians to attack. It never came. |
| Weeks passed, and with the onset of winter and running low on food supplies, a now-dismayed Napoleon was left with no option but to retreat. That's when Mikhail Kutuzov, the supreme Russian commander, struck. |
| Ending his strategy of patience, he turned loose his soldiers upon the long, straggling and retreating French army. Of the nearly half a million men who had confidently marched into Russia, only some 20,000 staggered out. And Kutuzov retired as a national hero. |
| This strategy translates directly into today's world of business and is probably most appropriate when dealing with competitor market share offensive. |
| Example: for several years, the majority of Internet companies disregarded sound business principles and obsessively chased market share at the expense of profits. A few sat out the madness and practised a strategy of patience. That was obviously the right thing to do, as evidenced by the bankruptcies among the more profligate companies. |
| Readers will also be able to clear some confusion over the distinction between strategy and tactics. Example: When Kodak's former chairman George Fisher announced the beginning of a 10-year and multi-billion dollar programme to dominate China's photographic film market, he was articulating a strategy. |
| When a Kodak expatriate manager in Beijing, in order to win government friends, helps to arrange an education visa at Michigan State University for the son of a ranking communist official, that is tactics. Sounds familiar? |
| FROM BATTLEFIELD TO BOARDROOM |
| Dennis Laurie Leads Press Price: Rs 250, Pages: 263 |
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