We had five factors from purpose to landscape to climate to doctrine to leadership and somehow I had been jumping from purpose to leadership and missing three of them. Despite what I had read, there existed two very different forms of why that mattered — purpose and movement — and we weren’t even considering movement. We had no maps of the environm... See more
Now imagine you’re playing against someone who can see something truly remarkable — the board. In this game, you will move Pawn(w), the opponent will counter Pawn (b), you will move again Pawn(w), they will counter Queen(b) and you will have lost. I’ve shown this in the figure below.
These universal approaches are my standard ways of operating, the doctrine that we follow. But if I cannot see the landscape then how do I know whether an approach is universal or context specific? In one battle just because a general may have won by flanking an opponent then it doesn’t mean ordering my troops to flank the opponent is going to work... See more
The point of this example is to demonstrate three things. First, the process of strategy is not a linear process but an iterative cycle. The climate may affect your purpose, the environment may affect your strategy and your actions may affect all. Second, acting is essential to learning. Lastly your purpose isn’t fixed, it changes as your landscape... See more
Since Sun Tzu had principally written about military combat, I started diving into military history in the hope of finding other lessons. I became obsessively fascinated by the extensive use of maps in battle and for learning throughout history. Topographical intelligence became a hugely important and decisive factor in numerous battles of the Amer... See more
We had become highly profitable, we had a million or so in the bank and we were growing. But we had done so not through any deliberate focus on the landscape but instead by just grabbing opportunities and cost cutting where we could. The team were already exhausted.
The problem I faced was trying to determine whether I understood the landscape of business or not? I knew that learning in both chess and military campaigns was different from what I was doing in business, but how? I put a map and a picture of chess board side-by-side and started to look at them. What is it that made these maps useful?