Abstract
Strategy and organization theory enjoy
a reawakening interest in historical analysis. In this essay, we suggest that
this engagement should include strategy’s linkage to the history of military strategy.
We develop our argument through an exegesis of Carl von Clausewitz’ treatise On
War. We claim that Clausewitz’ theorization of strategy advances the ongoing
scholarly conversation on the practice of strategy in three specific ways.
First, he defines a distinctive locus for the notion of strategy as the bridge
between policy and tactics; in so doing, he addresses what has been criticized
as strategy’s conceptual drift. Second, with Clausewitz, we can pose the
question of strategy’s effectiveness in a critical, reflexive way. This opens
up a way to answer the “so-what” question that has hampered strategy as
practice research. Third, as an educator in military affairs of the Crown
Prince, Clausewitz invites reflection on strategy’s pedagogy. Following Clausewitz,
strategy may not want to concern itself with distilling the next practice from
past history but immerse strategy students in great detail in history in order
to develop their critical faculties.
Keywords: Clausewitz, history, policy, strategy as practice, tactics, war
Introduction
Frequently cited, rarely read, and even
less engaged with, such is Clausewitz’ fate in studies of strategy and
organization. Yet, we currently witness a revival of historical analysis in
strategy and organization theory. Broadening this agenda in this essay, we
discuss strategy’s own history of thought focusing on its relationship with
military strategy. We contribute to such an endeavor by engaging with the work
of the Prussian General and writer Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz ([1832]
1989) noted the fundamental closeness of the two fields:
Rather than comparing [war] to art we
could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human
interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may
be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale. It is surprising that while both
organizational and military strategy share Clausewitz as their founding
(grand-) father, there is currently not much cross-fertilization of the two
traditions. Why might such a conversation matter?
Clausewitz’ treatise On War “the most important book on strategy ever written”
(Strachan, 2007: 244) provides three lessons for organizational strategy.
First, Clausewitz delimits the role of strategy in the face of the truly
disruptive Napoleonic wars, inviting us to rethink the possibility of strategy
in times of disruptive change (a theme usually attributed exclusively to our
present). In so doing, he investigates strategy’s relation to policy on the one
hand and tactics on the other, thus theorizing the practice of strategy as a
bridge between the overarching purpose of war and actual conduct on the
battlefield. For strategy as practice scholarship in particular (see Vaara and
Whittington, 2012, for a review), this means shifting the focus of analysis
toward bridging work between policy (i.e. purpose and identity) and tactics
(i.e. operations). Second, General Clausewitz was concerned with strategy’s
effectiveness and, of course, victory. But he experienced the difficult
relationship between winning and losing: the stronger army may win battles
only to lose the war. This puzzle invites reflection on the intricate nature of
strategy’s effectiveness which we (with Freedman, 2013, 2017) define as strategy’s
ability to “create power.” Again, for strategy as practice scholarship, this
provides an interesting extension of its vocabulary, allowing engagement with
important questions of effectiveness without falling back into either purely
critical or overly normative positions. Finally, as an educator, Clausewitz was
deeply concerned with how strategy could be taught in the classroom. He focused
on the importance of training the strategist’s own judgment which represents an
interesting pedagogical alternative to theory-light, often normative case study
teaching and critical approaches.
Thus, and in short, our aim with this
essay is to advance the research agenda on the practice of organizational
strategy by drawing on Clausewitz. Of course, given that Clausewitz wrote his
oeuvre almost 200 years ago, he does not provide straightforward answers for
problems of today, but what Clausewitz can do is help us to problematize the
present way of thinking strategy, to pose different questions, and to propose
an alternative analytical vocabulary.
Our essay is structured as follows.
First, we describe the status quo of military strategy and its radical
disruption through Napoleonic warfare. We then turn to Clausewitz’ theory of
strategy as the search for new guiding principles in the midst of this radical
disruption. We conclude with a discussion of how our reading of Clausewitz
might challenge and change ongoing conversations in strategy and organization
theory.
Napoleonic disruptions
Before Clausewitz: The quest for formalization of strategy
Clausewitz (1780–1831) traced his ideas
over the course of several decades, collecting them in his unfinished
manuscript On War which was published posthumously in 1832 by his wife.
Clausewitz was actively engaged on the battlefield and, later on, in charge of
instructing the Prussian Prince in the conduct of war. Thus, for him, strategy
was primarily a practical concern that needed to be answered through
experience: “Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too
high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned
and the
The soil in which Clausewitz grew his
ideas was one of radical disruption. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from
1792 to 1815 expanded military efforts vastly in both scope and intensity. When
Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, for instance, his Grande Armée counted almost
half a million men, while the Battle of Leipzig the following year was fought
over 4 days, involving 600,000 soldiers on both sides. In the 18th century, war
had been contained to smaller battles that were limited in time, space, and
intensity. This more contained form of warfare was guided by a military theory
that was modeled on geometry. Around 1750, for instance, the French theorists
of war Jacques-François de Chastenet de Puységur and Lancelot Turpin de Crissé
translated the design of material defense structures to the arrangement of
soldiers, shaping “human material” according to the same laws of geometry
(Figure 1).
The result of such formalized warfare
was a strict choreography, perhaps best embodied in the maneuvers of Frederick
the Great, King of Prussia from 1740 until 1786.
Napoleonic warfare, distinguished by
its unprecedented scale, dynamic, and destructive force, posed a serious challenge
to this logic of strategy based on geometry. As the Grande Armée swept through
Europe (Napoleon reportedly stated that the best soldier is not so much the one
who fights as the one who marches), military strategy theory had to retreat and
find new ground from where to formulate propositions that could provide a sound
basis for action. Strategy based on geometry became obsolete as Clausewitz
([1809] 1992) lamented in his letter to the German philosopher Fichte: “I have
seen all the traditional opinions and forms of military power among which I
grew up come apart like rotten timber and collapse in the swift stream of
events”.
War’s radical contingency
In response to the “rotten timber” that
the disruptive Napoleonic Wars left behind, Clausewitz developed a concept of
strategy that addressed the contingencies on the battlefield. The new warfare
was riddled with elements beyond the control and comprehension of the decision
maker, transforming war into an “empire of chance” (Engberg-Pedersen, 2015).
Hence, war was not a geometric puzzle or a chess game—the favorite metaphor of
18th century military theory. Rather, Clausewitz ([1832] 1989) argued, “in the
whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards”
(p. 86). The conditions and context for strategy had become shrouded in a “fog
of war” that defied logical analysis. Clausewitz defined three specific
difficulties for the strategist.
First, the strategist faces what Nobel
laureate Herbert Simon would describe much later as “bounded rationality”:
Since all information and assumptions
are open to doubt, and with chance at work everywhere, the commander
continually finds that things are not as he expected. […] During an operation
decisions have usually to be made at once: there may be no time to review the
situation or even to think it through. Usually, of course, new information and
reevaluation are not enough to make us give up our intentions: they only call
them in question. We now know more, but this makes us more, not less uncertain.
(Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 102; added emphasis).
This is a remarkably contemporary
analysis: Clausewitz suggests that information is difficult to gather and
process in the midst of the fog of war, but even if these obstacles are
overcome, the strategist’s uncertainty about what to do increases with the
amount of information at hand.
A second major difficulty is friction.
Clausewitz ([1812] 2003) elaborates in his memorandum for the Crown Prince that
the “basic principles of warfare” are “within the reach of any well-organized
mind”:
Even the application of these
principles on maps or on paper presents no difficulty, and to have devised a
good plan of operations is no great masterpiece. The great difficulty is this:
to remain faithful throughout to the principles we have laid down for
ourselves. The conduct of war resembles the workings of an intricate
machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned
on paper can be executed only with great effort.
Friction is what makes the difference
between war on paper and war on the battlefield, as Clausewitz warns. Warfare
is like “walking in water”: what looks effortless and simple on land becomes
difficult, says Clausewitz ([1832] 1989):
Friction is the only concept that more
or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. In theory it sounds reasonable enough: a battalion commander’s duty is to
carry out his orders; discipline welds the battalion together, its commander must
be a man of tested capacity, and so the great beam turns on its iron pivot with
a minimum of friction. In fact, it is different, and every fault and
exaggeration of the theory is instantly exposed in war. A battalion is made up
of individuals, the least important of whom may chance to delay things or
somehow make them go wrong. This tremendous friction, which cannot, as in
mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance,
and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely
due to chance.
There is an unbridgeable gulf between
war on paper and war in the field, between our capacity to plan and the
contingency of events. This point is echoed in research on business strategy:
for instance, MacKay and Chia (2013) analyzed friction as a result of the
unintended consequences of decisions and uncrowned processes.
The third major difficulty for the
development of a theory of strategy derives from the fact that war is not an
isolated act; rather, it is constituted through Wechselwirkung, that is,
psychological and com-bat forces that feedback on and act upon each other.
While both of these forces are decisive in battle, especially the former evade
quantification and hence calculation. Moreover, war is shaped by how actors
imagine possible future outcomes (for instance, the threat of annihilation
might motivate a small army to defeat a larger one). If the present is
contingent upon principally open futures, war defies logical analysis.
Clausewitz ([1832] 1989) concludes, war could be solved like an equation only
if:
(a) war
were a wholly isolated act, occurring suddenly and not produced by previous events
in the political world;
(b) it consisted of a single decisive act or a set of
simultaneous ones;
(c) the decision achieved was complete and perfect in
itself, uninfluenced by any previous estimate of the political situation it
would bring about.
But because the future feeds back on
the present, a linear approach to strategy development is necessarily
insufficient. Echoing this insight, strategy research has explored the
non-linearity of time in strategy and its resulting per formative effects (see
Kornberger and Clegg, 2011).
In sum, while Napoleon crushed armies,
his disruptive warfare also crushed the established logic of military strategy:
information uncertainty and bounded rationality, the friction of the military
apparatus, and the complex interplay of qualitative and quantitative forces
make war the empire of chance. Facing such disruption, what are the conditions
of possibility for a theory of strategy? Or closer to Clausewitz’ pragmatic
concern: how should the Prince be taught strategy without presenting him with
laws that will not withstand the encounter with reality nor leaving him with a
sense that it is luck and chance that prevail?
The possibility of strategy in the age
of disruption what is strategy (not)?
Clausewitz’ project is a critical
project in that it explores the limitations of the possibility of strategy in
the age of disruption. As we have seen, he criticizes strategy models based on
untenable formalization's of a process that is inherently contingent. On War
features a short chapter devoted to strategy which begins with a conventional
analytical move:
The strategic elements that affect the
use of engagements may be classified into various types: moral, physical,
mathematical, geographical, and statistical (Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 183).
But Clausewitz ([1832] 1989) quickly changes course:
It would however be disastrous to try
to develop our understanding of strategy by analyzing these factors in
isolation, since they are usually interconnected in each military action in
manifold and intricate ways. A dreary analytical labyrinth would result, a
nightmare in which one tried in vain to bridge the gulf between this abstract
basis and the facts of life. Heaven protect the theorist from such an
undertaking!.
This stance runs through Clausewitz’
oeuvre: for him, it is impossible to define a theory of strategy or a model of
strategy that could encompass the contingencies on the battlefield. There is no
“algebra of action” (Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 75) to guide the strategist.
Clausewitz ([1832] 1989) refers to Kant’s dictum that there can be no “Newton
of the blade of grass” for Newton needed a fixed, stable world for articulating
his laws. War is a “conflict of living forces” (p. 149); through its
uncertainties, its friction, and its reactivity, it defies calculation and
prediction. Thus the art of war is “most at home with those societies who do
not seem to have one, rather than with those who exhaust themselves in
war-related inventions” (Clausewitz, [1809] 1992). In other words,
formalization subverts the art of war. It leads to the “deterioration of the
art of war in petty crafts-man ship,” which destroys the “spirit” of war and
drives out any “entrepreneurial spirit.” Research in business strategy
resonates with this critique at an overly formalized, static and rational
approach (e.g. Chia and Holt, 2009).
Strategy as interface between policy and tactics
Given this critical stance, how to
think strategy? Clausewitz’ ([1832] 1989) strategy concept is narrow and precise.
He defines strategy as the “use of the engagement for the goal of the war”. Clausewitz packs three important cues into this deceptively simple
definition. First, strategy is concerned with the use of the engagement neither
its preparation nor its actual conduct. Rather, he suggests that victory (or
defeat) do not speak for themselves but need to be interpreted, and their
consequences need to be enacted in order to become effective. Second, the
reference for strategy is the engagement in other words, the battle itself. But
the battle is not directed by strategy; rather, strategy is concerned with the
use of the battle for the purpose set by policy, 1 which leads to the third
point: the goal of war. This goal is strategy’s horizon but again Clausewitz
suggests that the goal is outside of strategy’s domain.
This reading opens up an understanding
of strategy as one element in a triangle: strategy does not consist in fighting
battles nor in making policy, but as the mediating element between them. Policy
and tactics envelop strategy; or put differently: strategy is the bridge
between policy and tactics (Gray, 2010). Policy itself is concerned with the
objectives of war—it is about setting the ends to which war might be one
possible means. This defines the domain of politics and diplomacy, of national
interests and alliances. Its locus is the ruler’s desk or the salon where
guests, foreign and local, discuss the state of affairs. In policy, war is but
one possible instrument to achieve its objectives. The primacy of policy over
war is restated in a different way in Clausewitz’ famous dictum that “war is
politics by other means.” War “has to be treated as a part of some other whole;
the name of which is policy” (Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 606):
Once again: war is an instrument of
policy. It must necessarily bear the character of policy and measure by its
standards. The conduct of war, in its great outlines, is therefore policy
itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen, but does not on that account
cease to think according to its own laws. (Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 610) Tactics
constitutes the third point of the triangle with its own, specific locus: the
battlefield. For Clausewitz, tactics describes the actual use of the armed
forces in the engagement. In this domain, practices differ substantially from
those in the realm of policy. Clausewitz ([1832] 1989) captures the ability to
make the appropriate decisions on the battlefield as “the tact of judgment”:
War is the realm of uncertainty; three
quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of
greater or lesser uncertainty. Here, then, above all a fine and penetrating
mind is called for, to feel out the truth by the tact of its judgment.
For Clausewitz ([1832] 1989), the tact
of judgment is characterized by “two qualities” that are indispensable “for the
mind to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen”. He described these qualities as coup d’oeil defined as the ability to
make sense of a given situation without being able to fully analyze it, and as
courage d’esprit understood as the determination and incisiveness to act
despite the lack of certainty (see Kornberger et al., 2019). For Clausewitz
([1832] 1989), tactics is something that can be learned and, at least to some
extent, be generalized in rules of thumb: it “is that part of war in which
theory can develop most fully into a positive doctrine”.
Strategy’s relation between policy and
tactics is crucial as Clausewitz ([1832] 1989) argues, “According to our
classification, then, tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the
engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war” (p.
128). Strategy has to follow tactics onto the battlefield:
it follows, as a matter of course, that
strategy must go with the army to the field in order to arrange particulars on
the spot, and to make the modifications in the general plan which incessantly
become necessary in war. Strategy can therefore never take its hand from the
work for a moment. (Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 177).
Strategy, in other words, cannot think
of passing over to “implementation” of its propositions; rather, strategy must
move with the army onto the battlefield and constantly modify itself. Clausewitz
([1832] 1989) goes even further when he suggests that strategy “draws near to
tactics in order to receive the completed assignment from it” (p. 267). This is
an important formulation: strategy receives its assignment—its task—from
tactics; not the other way round. Clausewitz suggests that tactics drive
strategy, a reading supported by Strachan (2007: 116) who argued that tactics
shape, lead, and even dominate strategy. Strachan (2007: 45) describes the
Battle of Jena as one of the decisive battles in history because of the
“strategic exploitation of tactical triumph.” What happened on the battlefield
was determined by tactics; but what to make of the battle—how to use the battle
for the objective of war—was a matter of strategy: “Strategy was what gave
fighting significance; it exploited success on the battlefield and it created
the conditions for the next battle, while victory itself was gained through
combat and therefore was a matter of tactics” (Strachan, 2007: 107).
What is strategy for Clausewitz, then?
Strategy is the interface between policy and tactics: on the battlefield, it is
the General’s tactics that make the difference; on the conference table,
political leadership defines the “bigger whole” that envelops strategy.
Strategy is suspended between tactics and policy. Without a space proper,
strategy is constantly on the move between the conference table and the
battlefield. Strategy is the orchestration of the dialogue between the
politician and the mili-tary leader—the harmonization of the two logic's, not
the subordination of one to the other. Indeed, Clausewitz is highly aware of
the competition between these two logic's. At times, this may lead to an
internecine warfare between the two spheres—the military and the political—and
strategy must step in as the peacemaker to bring them to terms with one
another. Therein lies the reason why Clausewitz does not define strategy as
all-encompassing endeavor: war and policy follow different logic's and
practices; the strategist’s task is to bridge both, military power and
political prowess (Gray, 2010).
Implications, applications
The stress test for our exegesis is
this, then: how does our engagement with Clausewitz alter the conversation in
strategy and organization research? With Clausewitz, we can critically
interrogate the formalizations via model building of much mainstream strategy
such as Porter’s Five Forces, the VRIN model, the Blue Ocean model, or others.
They represent formalized approaches that supposedly draw on the laws of
competition and promise superior performance. With Clausewitz, these efforts
resemble pre-Napoleonic warfare: they are formalization's that lead into a
“dreary analytical labyrinth.” Since there is no algebra of action, the search
for a law of war or a model-based strategy is doomed to fail.
Instead Clausewitz suggested that
strategy is an ongoing activity that “must go with the army to the field in
order to arrange particulars on the spot”; the modifications of the “general
plan” is “incessantly necessary in war” and that strategy “can therefore never
take its hand from the work for a moment.” Thus a Clausewitzian reading of
strategy contributes to the strategy as practice tradition (for excellent
reviews, see Burgelman et al., 2018; Cabantous et al., 2018; Carter and Whittle,
2018; Vaara and Whittington, 2012) adding three distinct insights to the
conversation.
Redefining strategy practice
Clausewitz offers an alternative
understanding of the practice of strategy. For him, strategy needs to be read
in the context of two separate, yet related spheres—that is, policy and
tactics. Policy is about setting goals; tactics is concerned with the actual
conduct on the battlefield. Strategy is the interface between these two
domains: its function is to make sense of war and use fighting’s results for
meaningful policy objectives. Setting policy and conduct on the battlefield are
for Clausewitz guided by different logics and practices, yet the crucial
linkage between both—the use of the engagement for the objective of the war—is
what the strategist is concerned with. Thus, strategy is the bridge between
policy and tactics (Gray, 2010). Consequently, the locus of strategy shifts
toward the interface that structures the interaction between what is desirable
(policy) and what is possible (tactics). At its core, Clausewitz proposes, the
practice of strategy is concerned with the organization of the interface
between the two, how that which is possible shapes action and how action
delimits what is imagined as possible. This entails a constant tinkering with
both short-term means and long-term possibilities along a time axis. Put
differently, means and ends, tactics and policy need to co-evolve in constant
feedback loops. For Clausewitz, this perpetual exchange between the rapid coup
d’oeil and courage d’esprit on one hand and policy’s longue durée on the other
hand marks strategy’s complex temporality.
We argue that this conceptualization of
strategy is useful for future research on the practice of organizational
strategy as well. To date, strategy as practice scholarship has studied
meetings, sense making, discourse, and other micro-aspects of strategy work;
but in so doing, it has often lost sight of the connection between situated,
embodied, and local practice and big picture issues or what Clausewitz calls
policy (Suddaby et al., 2013). Clausewitz’ conceptualization of strategy
overcomes current tendencies toward such “micro-isolationism” (Seidl and
Whittington, 2014: 1408) as it defines the relationship between policy and
tactics as the locus of strategizing. Put differently, strategizing is
fundamentally a relational activity that spans modes of engagement (sword and
pen), spaces (battlefield and conference table), and temporalities (ad hoc of
tactics and longue durée). Thus, Clausewitz remedies what has been criticized
as conceptual drift in strategy as practice scholarship (Carter et al., 2008;
Mantere, 2005): he defines a locus proper for strategy practice as the bridge
between policy and tactics; while both domains follow their own logic, both are
held together by strategy.
How can Clausewitz’ triangle be
translated into ongoing conversations in strategy as practice scholarship? And
why is his seemingly narrow definition of strategy as bridging a potentially
useful tool for thinking? Prior to the disruptive Napoleonic Wars, strategy was
indeed applied geometry connecting policy with conduct on the battlefield
through a straight line. Clausewitz witnessed this order to “come apart like
rotten timber and collapse in the swift stream of events.” This diagnosis
foreshadows the loss of faith in large-scale strategic planning as Mintzberg
and others have discussed it. In response, Clausewitz develops an innovative
analysis: on the one hand, there is the realm of tactics, encompassing that
which concerns the conduct of business on an everyday level; on the other hand,
there is setting of policy, that is, defining an organization’s identity and
purpose (Mayer, 2018; see forthcoming SI in SO! on Exploring the
strategy-identity nexus). With Clausewitz, we argue that it is the strategist’s
first and foremost task to mediate between these two functionally
differentiated domains. What matters here is that in both military and business
strategy, there is a strong mutual dependency between tactics and policy:
long-term plans and goals are conditioned by tactical possibilities and
constraints, and vice versa. To provide more of a heuristic than an example,
under Steve Jobs, Apple’s strategy effectively used a series of successes on
the initially tactical level (i.e. iPod, iPad, iPhone) to reshape the purpose
and identity of the organization. Indeed, what was remarkable about Jobs as
strategist was his ability to drive hands-on product development workshops
while not losing sight of big picture issues (Isaacson, 2011). With Clausewitz,
we propose a shift in the locus of analysis from the micro of everyday
strategizing toward an analysis of the ongoing bridging work between tactical
possibilities and constraints on one hand and overarching organizational purpose
and identity on the other hand. Studying inter-faces, temporalities, and
practices that structure this bridging work points toward an inspiring future
research agenda.
Rethinking strategy’s effectiveness
Not surprisingly, as an experienced
general, Clausewitz understood strategy as directed against an enemy with the
aim to achieve victory. He could not accept chance, coincidence, or luck to
decide outcomes of battles. But victory itself is a complex phenomenon, as
Clausewitz cautions: military history knows of many generals who won battles
and lost wars. Business history knows of many organizations that introduced
break-through innovations but ultimately failed (see Christensen, 1997).
Addressing this somehow paradoxical
relationship, Clausewitz argues that an effective strategy is one that
relentlessly calibrates and re-calibrates conduct on the battlefield with
policy objectives. Strategy moves onto the battlefield, not to direct action
but to understand and use the outcome of the battle for the purpose of war. In
other words, strategy’s measure of effectiveness is not the execution of a plan
but its ability to use the result of fighting for policy ends. On the other
side of the bridge, strategic effectiveness means informing policymakers about
attainable and desirable purposes given tactical realities. Superior results
are an outcome of this bridging function.
Clausewitz’s conceptualization of
strategy’s effectiveness has potentially interesting implications for strategy
as practice research. The strategy as practice perspective has indeed been
criticized for dodging the question of effectiveness or “doing merely the
equivalent of observing individuals ‘flipping burgers’” (Burgelman et al.,
2018: 540; Mantere, 2005). Clausewitz helps to rethink the relation between
strategy and effectiveness, avoiding a perhaps overoptimistic picture of organizational
plasticity and the hopeful idea of organizational adaptability. Clausewitz
proposes focusing on the relation between actual fighting and policy. Effectiveness,
he argues, lies in relating one domain to the other, ensuring that tactical
success, perhaps even a heroic loss, contributes positively to accomplishing
policy objectives. Thus, effective strategy, to use the ingenious definition of
military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman (2013), becomes “the art of creating
power.”
Military history provides many
examples: Lawrence of Arabia’s (1926) strategy of guerilla warfare, Hart’s
(1941) indirect approach or bloodier, wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and most
recently Iraq all show that a stronger opponent may lose a war because of its
inability to relate superior strength and resulting tactical success on the
battlefield to desired policy outcomes. With Clausewitz, we can frame the
question of strategy’s effectiveness in a critical, reflexive way. This opens
possibilities to address the “so-what” question that has often hampered
strategy as practice research. Questions guiding such an inquiry could include:
How does a weaker opponent manage to create power and use it effectively
against a stronger opponent? Through which means does tactical success in a
competitive battle become meaningful beyond the moment? Translated into an
organizational language: how can a challenger (such as a start-up or a
movement) gain power in a marketplace dominated by established players? And how
can such a challenger use a tactical success (in a specific product category,
for instance) to buttress its strategic position in the longer term? Research
on start-ups that beat incumbents at their own game (Cusumano and Yoffie, 1999)
or renegade organizations that change the rules of the game (Durand and Vergne,
2012) are good examples for such strategic effectiveness.
Strategy’s pedagogy
Clausewitz was deeply concerned with
the pedagogy of strategy—after all Clausewitz was responsible for the military
education of the Prussian Crown Prince. Clausewitz asked, if strategy is based
on experience, how could it be taught in the classroom, far from the theater of
war? Clausewitz suggests that it is important for students to immerse
themselves in case studies that are as historically accurate as possible in
order to train their judgment. The tact of judgment is a skill that is at once
more abstract and at the same time more concrete than the specific tactical or
strategic lessons drawn from the case study: more abstract because judgment
cannot be reduced to the lesson that emerged from the case, and more concrete
because it shifts the focus from purely cognitive enlightenment (if this
happens, then one should do that . . .) to an embodied, intuitive praxis.
Knowledge must become capability, Clausewitz ([1832] 1989: 147) insists. And in
lieu of actual combat experience, the best way to develop such embodied
knowledge is through the in-depth study of history.
For strategy as practice scholarship,
this concern with teaching strategy is pivotal given its aim to be close to and
useful for practitioners (Whittington, 1996). Clausewitz’ use of strategy
history differs from common case study approaches that offer templates in the
form of best practice, toolkits, or models. Clausewitz attributes a distinct
pedagogy to historical case studies. Engagement with coup d’oeil and courage
d’esprit in the battlefield can result in a “positive doctrine.” In this sense,
detailed historical studies may guide the future leader in “self-education.”
But—and this is an important critical injunction—theory “should not accompany
him to the battlefield” (Clausewitz, [1832] 1989: 141). In other words, the
study of history is the most apt way to prepare the strategist’s mind for
future war, but only if it does not entertain “any absurd claim to communicate
the secret of victory” (Aron, 1983: viii). Transferred into the class-room,
this means that strategy should not concern itself with distilling next
practice from past history. Rather, it should immerse students in history rich
in detail and complexity (going beyond the typical case study approach) and
utilize this engagement to train the critical faculties of students of strategy.
For instance, studying the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) and Athens’ fatal
decision to invade Sicily still provides invaluable lessons for contemporary
strategic challenges, as Gaddis (2018) showed magisterially.
Conclusion: some shared concerns between military and organizational strategy
Our concluding remarks highlight some
of the shared concerns that could inspire future engagement between military
and organization strategy scholars (Kornberger, 2013).
First, history matters. As the door to
the future opens inwards, to go through, one has to take a step back. When
stepping back, we find a rich repository of themes that might foster future
dialogue. One of the most eminent examples is cold war rationality and its
focus on game theory that inspired much of early business strategy (Erickson et
al., 2013). More recently, “netwar” describes warfare con-ducted by networked
forms of organization that rely heavily on information technology and strong
narratives that are usually associated with social movements (Freedman, 2017:
27). Or to mention a third example, in his noteworthy account of leading the
Joint Special Operations Task Force in the second Iraq war, General Stanley
McChrystal (2015) argued that the biggest “limiting factor” for military
success was “the mundane art of management” (p. 32). In order to overcome this
“limfac,” he re-organized his unit’s strategy-making practices with the aim
that their “structure” would “become their strategy” (McChrystal, 2015: 103).
The three examples that stretch across the 20th century and beyond offer a
shared epistemic space between military and organizational strategy that future
research could explore. For organizational strategists, this would be a
valuable opportunity to learn from the perhaps most complex and high-stakes
context of strategy practice (e.g. Grint, 2014).
Second, dialogue could help
understanding strategic change. For instance, in both fields, there is a strong
reliance on technological innovation as the engine of change and a source of
competitive advantage. Proponents of the Revolution in Military Affairs argued
that soon “war will become an essentially frictionless engineering exercise”
(Singer, 2009: 185). Critical military strategy cautions against such optimism
arguing that “[e]ven for modern Western forces, technology encouraged a fantasy
of a war that was fast, easy, and decisive: yet, they still found themselves
facing ‘slow, bitter and indecisive war’” (Freedman, 2017: 279). A deeper
engagement with the history of military strategy may prevent strategists from
placing too much faith in the power of technology. Indeed, as Freedman (2017)
notes, some of the most effective attacks of the 21st century were conducted by
terrorists armed with knives, guns, or trucks. This serves as a stark reminder
that what matters strategically is the use of the battle for the pursuit of the
larger objective. For organizational strategists, work on indirect strategy
(Hart, 1941) and guerilla warfare (Lawrence, 1926) mentioned above can help to
understand how strategy actually creates power to change the state of affairs,
rather than how it supposedly just uses the means handed to it by technological
advances.
A third theme for future
interdisciplinary work is the growing convergence between military and civil
operations and the important question of governance of emerging
military–civilian net-works. Since World War II, military strategy has
observed, and in some cases instigated, a shift from contained conflicts
between state actors to more widespread non-combat conflicts including crisis
management or responses to natural disasters. In response scholars have
developed novel concepts such as network centric warfare (Alberts et al.,
1999), network strategy (Slaughter, 2017), or civil–military strategies to hybrid
threats (Cusumano and Corbe, 2018). Organizational strategists who focus on
open strategy (Hautz et al., 2017), wicked problems and grand challenges may be
interested in these well-documented strategies for networked collective action.
In sum, we hope our essay provides a
starting point for further conversation between military and organization
strategy, and albeit finishing it duly with a full stop, we heed the
historian’s wisdom that in history every full stop is a comma in waiting.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential
conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the
following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of
this article: Anders Engberg-Pedersen would like to acknowledge that work on
this essay has partly been supported by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Velux
Foundations.
Notes
1. In the German original, Clausewitz uses
the concept of Politik which means both policy and politics. We will use policy
as translation as we focus on the goal-oriented aspects of Politik rather than
its adversarial making (politics).
2. We differ here from Howard and Paret
who omit the important word “tact” in their translation.
3. We differ again from Howard and Paret’s
translation who write that “the strategist must maintain control throughout”;
in our view, this is quite an interpretative stretch.
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