Harvard Business Review: Stop Using Battle Metaphors in Your Company Strategy

By Frank V. Cespedes

The economist Fritz Machlup wrote an essay about weaselwords: “words concealing voids of thought . . . used to avoid commitment . . . which destroy the force of a statement as a weasel ruins an egg by sucking out its content.” Machlup was talking about how economists often use words like “structure” instead of empirical cause-and-effect linkages. Ironically, after years of books, articles, and MBA programs dedicated to strategic thinking, that’s the danger with how strategy is used in business meetings. It’s too often a way of sounding smart or leader-like and used to avoid necessary choices.

Machlup explained how this can happen: when an economist uses the word “labor,” no one “will ever think of the painful muscle contractions preceding childbirth, and if we say ‘capital’ he may not know precisely what we mean, but he will rarely confuse it with the seat of government in a state or country.” But when multiple words used to refer to different aspects of complex phenomena have overlapping meanings, then “the context [cannot] be relied upon to indicate which meaning is intended [and] the writer or speaker has a moral duty, I would say, to state what he means.” So let’s first clarify what strategy is not.

The word strategy comes from the ancient Greek for a “general” in a military campaign. Strategy gurus constantly use analogies with battle plans for “competitive advantage” versus the enemy. But the metaphor is not suitable because business, unlike a war or battle, is not primarily about defeating an enemy. Business is primarily about customer value: targeting customer groups and tailoring products, sales and other activities to serve those groups better or differently than others. You don’t learn much about that from studying Caesar, Napoleon, Sun Tzu, or whoever your favorite general is.

The analogy is also used selectively and inconsistently. A repeated example is Hannibal’s defeat of the larger Roman army at Cannae by his pioneering use of flanking tactics. But we don’t often hear about Fabius Maximus, a Roman general nicknamed “The Delayer,” who simply wore down Hannibal’s invading army by avoiding pitched battles. Hannibal lost that war. Or another favorite, von Clausewitz, tells us that detailed planning is everything but drop the plan once the shooting starts. Which is it? We already know that business, like other mortal activities, is uncertain. As Damon Runyan said, “All life is six-to-four against.” So what gain really comes from the military analogy?

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