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... See more

I started to consider strategy in terms of these five factors. I understood our purpose, or at least I thought I did, but what about landscape? Normally in military conflicts or even in games like chess we have some means of visualising the landscape through a map, whether it’s the more geographical kind that we are familiar with or an image of the... See more

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?

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... See more