Strategy as a discourse in human welfare

This book and its central thesis present meta-paradoxes""and that's appropriate enough because The Master Strategist is largely written in the form of aphorisms illustrated by paradoxes.

Patel articulates an intriguing premise that may in fact turn out to be a very basic and important insight: homo sapiens must deliberately invest in learning how to think strategically.

He argues this logically and his arguments are studded with overkill in terms of detail. Yet, in the end, the book contributes little more than a diffused framework for discussing that central insight.

However, by even starting a debate on the need to develop overarching capacities for strategic thought, Patel may have done us all a service.

As he points out, humanity has invested enormous resources in scientific R&D and developed various tools and technologies that have brought almost unimaginable benefits.

But we have not learnt how to deploy these tools in such a manner as to optimise the potential benefits. Optimising these deployments will require strategic thought.

If humanity now invests in researching and developing strategy as a discipline and thus manages to create a large global pool of strategists, it will then be able to deploy technologies and resources more efficiently.

That might mean an end to global hunger, poverty, genocide, environmental degradation and armed conflict.

One could argue about the reasons but there would be cent per cent consensus across the political spectrum about the fact that humanity doesn't deploy its knowledge base optimally.

Or else, we would not have the paradoxes of people dying of tuberculosis, half a century after a cure was found, or millions starving in Africa even as the EU destroys mountains of surplus food.

Multitudes live and die in degraded environments lacking access to clean water, sanitation, electricity and education while luckier multitudes take the marvels of modern technology for granted as they sip their ice-cold Perrier and send their MMS-es.

An army of trained strategists might indeed make a difference to the way in which the world works. Unfortunately very few people are trained to think strategically, there is little understanding of the nature of strategic thought and that understanding is biased by its origins.

Patel acknowledges that when he says that our theoretical understanding of strategy as a subject is tainted because it draws disproportionately on the narrow domain knowledge of military theorists (Sun Tzu, Clausewitz) and management theorists (name your Guru).

War deals in armed conflict; business deals with competition and sometimes provokes wars. It is perhaps difficult to adapt tools forged in the crucible of conflict to usher in an age of global "prosperity, peace and freedom".

However, strategy does play a part in an entire range of unwarlike activities. Patel cites the examples of social activists, political thinkers and mystics who have employed their instinctive grasp of strategy to achieve desirable goals such as environmental protection, socio-political change and spiritual awakening while minimising conflict.

How can we broaden our understanding of strategy? By learning to think in a certain way, by understanding the interplay of many variables in our environment and by being flexible and adaptive.

This is obvious and it can be stated very simply in terms of developing flexibility and focus. But these points are belaboured in much detail over several chapters.

There, the focus of the book starts straying too close to the self-help format though it is much too erudite to ever quite slide over the border into Khera-Coelho land.

The author resorts to churning out aphorism after aphorism on strategy and the mental makeup of a master strategist. Often the details he refers to in passing are more interesting than the aphorisms themselves.

For example, he postulates that our language will change as we draw strategic learnings from a wider field of human accomplishments""perhaps chaos theory will contribute to the vocabulary of the modern strategist. Indeed this could be a fascinating process.

Speaking personally, a focus on the creation and presentation of a likely blueprint for the broader dissemination of strategic thought would have been much more interesting.

How exactly does one find alternative methods of studying strategy and its applications""what are the possible payoffs? From where does one draw a pool of strategic researchers and how do their learnings percolate back into society at large? These are questions the book doesn't answer in much detail although it does offer a framework of new alternative institutions.

There is also a possible disconnect in terms of the author's understanding of his meta-audience in that his primer for self-development is a wee bit lacking in entertainment value.

By definition, Patel's target audience is the young adult because most of the world's population consists of young adults.

Their eyes might glaze over if they are informed about the virtues of meditation and told that they must be "agents of change"(a result) rather than a "change agent".

If instead, they were exhorted to play "Civilisation", "Simcity", contract bridge, backgammon or go, for that matter, they would probably be more likely to learn strategy.

The Master Strategist
Power Purpose and Principle

Ketan J Patel
Hutchinson
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 595