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The Strategy Book

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Ted Galpin

Leo over at Zen Habits is suggesting I would be happier if I write more. He’s probably correct.

So here’s a story boys and girls… (And usual rules apply, keep Google handy for my obscure references, HTML links go stale too fast)

About a year ago, an interesting gentleman named Max McKeown apparently found my inconsistent effort here, saw some value, and asked me to read and review a book he’d written. I accepted, and he graciously sent me a free copy of the book. It coincidentally arrived on my birthday.

Of course, as I said, that was a year ago. Max, I am very sorry it took a year, but I’m finally fulfilling my end of the bargain. Thanks for the cool book!

So as I said, the book showed up in the mail (via Amazon I think). Of course, I had just bought a house, after starting a new job. Not to mention the normal stress of toddler chaos, etc. As Aaron Allston once wrote – you have to know what the timing is good for. Well, the timing was terrible. Took me about 6 months to read the book, mostly on my lunch hour at the office. I’ve probably reread half the chapters twice. Actually started at least 4 different versions of this article in the last 9 months. There’s a draft on Google docs, one on WordPress iPhone app, and another in my Awesome notes app, probably a draft or two sitting in my email. Not to mention copious notes scribbled in the margins and the inside book cover.

But here’s the two lessons learned that are pretty obvious to an outside observer. I was way too overcommitted at the time I made the commitment. But It’s never too late to try, try again. You’ll never finish if you don’t try.

First Edition Cover

So, I read and carefully reread and considered Max McKeown’s Strategy Book for the better part of a year.

It’s a good book. Based on what I could find in a little bit of open source intelligence (i.e. online research); Max is an English writer, consultant, academic and thought leader type with a collection of graduate degrees in Business Strategy. You can find him on YouTube, Wikipedia, and Twitter, but no TED Talk yet. He appears to like black leather jackets and presents wearing t-shirts.

Hence, his Strategy Book is informal and well focused on business strategy; though I would argue many of it’s lessons are applicable to strategic science in general.

Now, I preface my critique by saying I’m a serious wonk. Just a few days ago I went on my first after dark babysitter date since my daughter was born. My wife took me to a presentation/reception with the NASA Team that just finished a 5-year research project on Saturn’s moon Titan. I wished they had been more technical, but it was a general audience of about 200 people, so I instead acted like a giddy teenager.

So when I say Max’s book is light and easy to read but lacks scientific rigor; that’s the opinion of a physicist. Many of you will adore the fact that Max uses plain language and an organized format to explain and validate dozens of basic concepts of strategy without any mathematics or science, but with a good dose of real life examples and anecdotes from the business world.

I personally view the book as fundamentals of business strategy. Max obviously knows what he is talking about. The book is an excellent business strategy 101. And it has a place on my bookshelf as such. It distills the state of strategy practice as known by western business schools. It was very reminiscent of everything I saw taking my Strategic Planning Professional exam a couple years ago.

The book does not cover much else. You have to get past the normal consultant/thought leader fluff in the beginning. The examples talk about products and services, customers and market competition. You will not find math, game theory, economics, military science, behavioral science, or really any straight science. It’s simply good, solid business school strategy. Which makes it accessible and digestible to a wide audience, and Max does show a level of sophistication with his craft. I found myself nodding my head up and down through most of the book. It’s a valuable read.

I wish it had been more technical and more precise in many places. But that was not the purpose of the book, nor it’s writer. It’s a business guy talking business strategy. No more, no less.

Every Chapter is formatted with a stated objective, the context of the objective, the challenges involved, how to recognize/measure success of implementing the objective, and the potential limits and pitfalls involved. The 235 pages walk you through understanding strategy as a subject, how to internalize strategy in yourself, create and implement it in a business organization; and a collection of his favorite business strategy tools like SWOT, Porter’s 5 forces, various idea maps, visualization matrices, and processes that he has had success with. It’s a Strategy MBA in a single book, with a decent index.

And the best part is he gives plenty of advice on how the reader, likely not being an executive, but likely an analyst or middle manager can navigate corporate culture to make use of the knowledge of the book. Yes, kids, there is some good wisdom in the pages too. He has a chapter entitled “Understanding what can go wrong.” He spends time on the fact the strategy is change management. If you can get your mind outside the box, it covers layman’s strategy well and can be useful for most decision making and problem solving, especially where you face a group dynamic (friends, family, organizations, and businesses).

Most business strategy books are trying to sell a theory, process, or system. Max chose to give us a useful broad reference instead. And he intentionally filled every topical chapter with thought provoking questions intended to guide your own critical thinking process, and teach you how to think like a strategist.

As I said, It’s a good, educational book. You can find it on Amazon or at http://www.maxmckeown.com/ Paperback only, which has a cool slick polymer finish that feels good in my hands but couldn’t find it on Kindle. Sorry Kids. (Update – as of 2016 on Kindle)

After writing this, I think I’ll read The Strategy Book again after I finish The Japanese Art of War, something Thomas Cleary wrote that I have to reread whenever I get caught in my own OODA Sprial, something that appropriately describes my past 2 years. Which is another lesson learned; it doesn’t matter how much they pay you, a painful job is a painful job, no amount of money can change that.

So if you want a good read in business strategy 1o1, Max McKeown wrote the book for you.

That’s all I got today. Thanks for reading,

Ted S Galpin, SPP

Posted in Book Review, Business Strategy, Strategy | Tagged Max McKeown | Leave a comment

And we’re back – with some thoughts on the OODA Spiral

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Ted Galpin

Just short on my lunch break, but had some fascinating side discussions helping out with the strategic planning for ironically the Association of Strategic Planning (ASP).

(Warning, on a reread this is heavy wonk on esoteric terminology, and I’ve found hyperlinks outside the blog to reference ideas expire and then do little good, keep google handy).

I was pondering the idea of combining Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s game theory approaches with proactive OODA loops. An idea that I have played with for years, my father started calling an OODA Spiral. If Observe, Orient, Decide, Act is a good scientific model for human / mammal decision making….

Then it possible to get “looped.” Literally things are happening faster than you can keep up, and the world passes you by, at least for a moment. Happens to me allot when I am trying to do something while my Wife and Daughter compete for my attention. Invariably I get looped by to much information and burn my breakfast on Saturday morning. I would argue that getting looped, or a lock of the decision cycle is generally what happens to a quarterback right before he gets sacked. Can’t make a decision fast enough, and somebody else ends the play for him. Read: “Looped” = Decision lock = a stalled or interrupted OODA cycle. You get stuck on observe and orient, can’t decide and act fast enough.

SO a decision spiral is when a decision making process gets looped, and more information / things happening just loop again and again into a spiral of inaction. That would be what the US military calls “Shock and Awe”. If there is more happening than you can deal with, you loose the ability to make decisions until the world slows down enough that you can orient to it.

The Game theory aspect of it it simply knowing what people will focus on, and if you can loop them, trap them in an OODA spiral they no longer can make make actions that effect you – at least as long as you can keep them in a spiral. Talk about taking initiative.

That’s the idea anyway. Let me know what you think.

The concept that hit me talking with my friends at ASP, was that in organizational strategic planning, i.e. strategic planning for a business; a decision spiral could be related to the common phenomena of strategic plans that sit on a shelf and never get implemented.

This goes back to my old post on OODA loops and the tyranny of the urgent killing any schwerpunkt one might have. So busy fighting off alligators you forget you are in the swamp to drain it, not fight alligators. In business, most of the executives I know are so busy fire fighting, caught up in tactical urgency, they never have time for anything strategic.

That’s pretty well established. But think of that in terms of an organizational OODA spiral. The environment is changing faster than the organizational decision cycle can react, and eventually they give up trying to constantly reorient. They don’t even figure out how to orient to a strategic plan they spent resources developing, they just see lots of change and work that is hard to understand, and the whole company joins in a stand alone complex of work on tactical urgency, maintaining the status quo… Instead of making strategic decisions and actions that would remove or preempt the tactical problems. The whole organization gets trapped in an OODA spiral.

Apologies – A stand alone complex – concept from a show called Ghost in the Shell. Basically a stand alone complex is a simple idea empowered by the information age. Given the same information, people tend to make the same decision. Give the same information in the form of tweets and TV to a few million kids on twitter, you get brand based social moments and the Arab spring. A stand alone complex is a simple consequence of game theory. Viral information that inspires action in a significant part of the population, that all individually come to the same orientation, decision, and action from the same or similar observation. That is a stand alone complex.

So what?

OK. Many esoteric ideas add up to what?

The short version is simply this. If we know the root cause of a problem, we can engineer a solution. If strategy rarely if ever gets implemented in businesses because of a stand alone complex in the form of an OODA spiral, at least among leader ship. Then the solution is to not let leadership get looped. Prevent the OODA Spiral. Traditionally in strategic planning that means the executive decision maker simply makes the decision and then coerces action down the chain of command to make change and implement strategy.

But there have got to be other ways than brute force, right? Can a strategy professional influence a CEO, Board, or group of senior decision makers in such a way to prevent the OODA spiral that prevents them from implementing a strategic plan once they have it?

I’m thinking yes. Change management before the Change? More on that later

Thanks for reading the Lunch Time analysis.

-Ted S Galpin SPP

Posted in Business Strategy, Math, Strategy | 1 Comment

Motives, Managing Expectations, Alignment and Friction.

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Ted Galpin

So, been gone for a very long time.

Explanation – life is what happens while you are making other plans. Survived the “new normal” economy. New day job, new house, lots of new changes.

First a good strategic lesson I just picked up from a really popular blog: The Art of Non-Conformity

“…one important fact: it is always very important to carefully examine someone’s motives in communicating.

Whenever you read something, ask yourself, “What are the author’s motivations? Why did he or she choose to devote a great deal of time and effort to one particular thing in exclusion of others?”

Good lesson from Chris Guillebeau. Why am I doing this? Because writing about strategy helps me understand it. And I love strategy and want to understand it better. Sharing it helps because other people read what I say, let me know when I’m wrong, challenge my assumptions, and help me learn.

So, I was speaking of new changes in my life.

Including a paradigm shift here at Strategic Science. This started out as my rather ambitious goal of putting out well researched, well edited and referenced technical essays on strategy on a consistent basis. That takes way too many hours. Obviously not a realistic goal. But I did get a surprising amount of very positive feedback for my efforts. And since noticed I’ve still spent an inordinate amount of time writing about strategy. Just that half of it went to a couple of friends in email, and the rest sits in a filing cabinet full of notes…

Not an effective strategy. I got OODA Looped by a combination of unrealistic expectations and normal distraction caused by life, family, career, kids.

So to apply lessons learned. It’s easy to lose sight of strategic goals when urgency ends up trumping priority. Or in this case tactical (short term) needs trumps strategic (i.e. long term goals). And one of my long term goals is to use this tool as a way to build a strategy body of knowledge.

So going forward, probably less technical rigor – but hopefully more than a couple posts a year.

Today’s lessons to share. “It is always very important to carefully examine someone’s motives in communicating.”

But to go beyond the obvious, do that with yourself. Carefully examine your motives in what you are doing. Are your actions, tactics, methods strategically aligned with your goals? Mine were not, and I’m the strategy geek. Sure, there are mitigating circumstances that impede strategy. Clausewitz and the United States Marine Corps call that strategic friction “That which makes the seemingly simple extremely difficult.”

Strategic alignment is a no brainer right? You need to focus on your schwerpunkt, balance urgency with strategic priority, and keep your actions aligned with your schwerpunkt. As Myomoto Mushashi wrote “Do nothing useless.”

But plan for friction. It will happen. If you’re at war or in construction the obvious friction will be weather and logistics. If your executing strategy in business, your obvious friction will be budget and culture; or as Stephen Haines liked to say, “The Shark of culture eats strategy every time.”

Plan on friction, or you will make the same mistake I made for the last two years. Scroll down the blog and you’ll see the results made by underestimating strategic friction. You may get by for awhile, but don’t be surprised when you get bogged down.

Posted in Business Strategy, Military Strategy, Self Help, Strategy | 2 Comments

The coolest thing I’ve seen all year (AI)

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Ted Galpin

Hi there world.

First – A warning to all you young turks out there gearing up to change the world. It will vary with circumstances, but infants are resource consuming schwerpunkts, that will make it difficult to finish any other projects (Apologies for the slow trickle of articles).

Teaser – the lead in is a little long, but the topic is recent developments in AI managed strategy.

On to the topic at hand. As a Strategy geek, growing up I spent inordinate amounts of time playing strategy games. As with many this fascination started out with Chess and Axis and Allies, but quickly moved on the the likes of Herzog Zwei, Star Control, and Star Wars: Rebellion… Leading to a long list occasionally continuing now with distractions like Sins of a Solar Empire. I learned all about resource management, maneuver and misdirection, and the limits of computer interface and computer opponents. My pipe dream for years has been an in game macro building interface that would allow me to automate repetitive tasks and coordinate complicated tasks requiring multiple commands issued simultaneously; like coordinating multi vector combined arms assault. Something nearly impossible to pull off with a mouse and keyboard, hot key, click, drag and drop interface.

I digress. The standard in real time strategy (RTS) games is Blizzard’s franchise StarCraft. Published in 1998, it’s still heavily played and the subject of multiple professional leagues (mostly in South Korea) despite it’s sequel being released last year (something I’ve avoided, my time being stretched too thin already).

StarCraft is simply the standard because it’s known as the most refined, polished, and accessible yet complex RTS game available, with arguably the best game balance. A reputation made possible by years of constant user feedback and updates to an initially best of class software.

So what? Star Craft is nothing new. Cool, but basically just a good diversion. Though many would argue that due to the sophistication of the game, it does make a good laboratory for experimenting with strategy and tactics. Personally I’ve successfully been able to use it to play with concepts like Shock & Awe, OODA Loops, using psychology against human players; and geometry and pattern recognition against AI (artificial intelligence or computer programed) opponents. One of the limits I found with the AI in StarCraft (and pretty much every other game I’ve played), is eventually, if you survive long enough, it seems like the AI reaches the end of it’s script, and basically falls asleep into a passive state. In Star Craft it only takes a few hours; even playing against 7 AI players, I know if I can last about 3 hours the AI will slow down and give me a chance to take them out one by one. In newer RTS games it may take longer, but inevitably I found in playing AI opponents, if I can set up a strong defense and economy; I can basically wait for the AI script (or scripts for multiple opponents) to run out and go passive on me (something I found by accident in Sins of A Solar Empire, this can take 30 hours, but a good defense will last if you leave the game running while you sleep and go to work). Then winning the game is easy. Now the same tends to work with human opponents, typically after hours of play they get tired and sloppy, resorting to attrition (especially late on Friday nights), and even the best players will make mistakes and give you opportunities if you can wear them down or confuse them.

Which brings me to the coolest thing I’ve seen this year. I was looking online to see if my theory on AI scripts running out was correct. During that search I unexpectedly stumbled into the Coolest Thing I’ve seen in at least a year.

Apparently the University of California Santa Cruz has a thriving AI research program in computer science; and when the StarCraft API was made available to the public in 2009, and a new opportunity was quickly recognized. You could create a stand alone AI player program that could control StarCraft through the API. In the spirit of Deep Blue and Chess AI, they decided to take AI research to the next level by organizing a StarCraft AI game competition. Chess is hard because you have to consider all moves and see the future, but the moves are limited. AI playing Poker is mostly a matter of probability. Go is harder because you have many more pieces and more moves to consider, but you can always see the whole board. In Star Craft you have to deal with all of the above, plus the fog or war (i.e. the unknown areas of the game you can’t see), resource management, and the rock paper scissors limitations of different units in battle. And you have to do all this in real time, the other players don’t have to wait to take their turn. They can keep making moves while you are still making a decision. Until now, all AI research done with RTS has been limited to buggy, open source home made games with their own host of issues. For the first time AI research has access to a reliable and refined commercially developed RTS software for research.

To quote an AI instructor at Berkley “I can literally walk down the list of concepts we cover and show you where every one of them show up in StarCraft and in our agent.”

So simply put, programing an AI to play Star Craft is not only a legitimate activity for research in computer science and artificial intelligence, but there are multiple professional leagues on different continents that can provide highly ranked players to test the AI against.

So it’s great for computer science research, and yeah, programing a computer to play a real time strategy game is fun. But what does this have to do with strategy?

AI is already here
Forces you to formalize the basics
It gives you a lab to experiment in
Lessons learned
A Culture of Innovation
My Wish List

AI is already here

As a Strategist, the concept of Artificial intelligence is a fun idea. If I program a computer correctly, can it execute strategy for me? My early lament in college was simply just to have a macro script interface for Star Craft, so I could automate repetitive and predictable tasks; like resource gathering and scouting; not to mention more easily coordinate the actions of a hundred units better. Hot keys help to speed up a mouse and keyboard interface, but it’s almost impossible to really manage a good Cannae style pincer moment clicking a mouse as fast as you can ordering a few units at a time.

But the potential is there. That type of automated strategy is already present in the stock market. You can look at price history of stocks, and where the price changes go from a relatively smooth curve of deliberate human decision changing to the saw tooth up and down of algorithm based trading is really obvious; especially to my friends that engineer industrial controls systems where you see the same phenomena. Computers react faster, and typically more decisively. They trade stocks, run industrial equipment, and keep our power, communications, and financial infrastructure running reliably, by reacting faster and taking in far more information with more precise memory than a human operator. The limit being they don’t yet think, and for the most part automated control systems, typically SCADA based, can only deal with situations they are programed for. Anything weird happens, in a hedge fund or an industrial control circuit; the computer doesn’t think, it defaults to a human operator to make the hard choices. Now when it comes to keeping the lights on and the value of my 401k, I’m glad they are not experimenting with artificial intelligence that can out perform human decision making; the price of mistakes is too high.

But in a game? A video game play tested for over a decade to be arguably the best available real time strategy environment? I though a computer playing Jeopardy was Cool, but the guys at IBM got to have all the fun. Now I have a playground for testing AI. I have a playground for testing Strategy. Best of all, I have a playground for testing AI controlled tactics and strategy. And there is a formal competition where I can compete against my peers. Makes it easy to figure out what theoretical strategic fundamentals are needed, and which aren’t. You can measure, record, replay. All the things you can’t do in the real world that makes after action analysis so much the purview of opinion and guess work as much as fact.

Forces you to formalize the basics

The military strategy community is working on ideas like 4th Generation Warfare, 5th Generation warfare, asymmetric warfare, swarming, and network centric warfare. An exercise like the StarCraft AI Competition forces the participants “back to basics” especially in terms of strategy. They couldn’t just program in tactics and maneuvers. Given the rules of the game, they had to invent decision making and management software to obtain and manage resources; i.e. the had to start with logistics. Then teach software to scout out targets, have a memory and then decide what to invest your resources in, and what resources to use against what targets.

But the point is they had to start from scratch and do everything. Formalize the computer basics of logistics and resource planning into computer algorithms; before the computer could even build an army to maneuver. Strategy doesn’t get more fundamental than that. They can’t ignore anything as details to be handled later by subordinates, there are no givens. Every behavior has to be programmed in, and when they miss something, it was readily apparent in testing as a weakness that was exploited by an opponent.

It gives you a lab to experiment in.

It gives you a laboratory to test your theories against both theoretical AI frameworks, and test against expert human players, to validate or prove the theories wrong. Once you get the fundamentals down, you can still fine tune them, test them hundreds of times quickly to see what the algorithm is missing. And as the AI gets more sophisticated, you can layer and prioritize different techniques and theories in the program, and see what works, and what doesn’t.

The academically built parametric models used for AI research and military defense planning simply are not as sophisticated or refined as the millions of man hours that have gone into StarCraft. This is a far better Sandbox than we’ve ever seen before. Powerful, sophisticated technology that’s already built and very affordable. A Strategy Theoretician’s dream come true. Now I just need to work on my programming skills.

Lessons learned

The UC Team, creators of the Berkley Overmind AI that won the first competition in 2010 has shared it’s experiences in many places online.

The learning experiences from the first competition are note worthy to the larger practice of strategy. Static scripted plans just didn’t work, they were easy to out maneuver or disrupt. Strategies had to be flexible and able to adapt. Creating “agents” or sub processes in the AI to handle different responsibilities and decision making was the next step. They had to create list of responsibilities, an org chart, and division of responsibility. And they each had to be flexible and interactive to respond to the ever changing competitive environment. Just like a modern business or army.

They gave the computer a series of schwerpunkts for different situations, and let the AI decide when to do what based on the current conditions. Just like the practice of letting middle management/ tactical commanders dictate their own tactics to achieve their objectives.

Most of the AI development was spent purely on resource planning and management.

When It came to combat strategy, they were already short on time, so they picked Zerg Mutalisks, a very versatile and affordable air unit to base their entire offense on. They programmed the Mutalisks to fly in groups, and gave them essentially a vector field that pushed them to attack targets, and push away from danger. Using several clever techniques to fine tune the vector field and teach the agent target selection resulted in an expertly executed hit and run cycling swarm that picked off the most dangerous enemies first while avoiding enemy attacks. A level of tactical control I could never pull off with my mouse.

But their offensive strategy was simple. Find the easiest to use weapon available, and figure out of to maximize it’s potential. Simple strategy executed by very refined and simple yet effective tactics. Not really different from Pepsi selling cola or WD40 selling cans of lubricant. Pick something simple and reliable, and just get really good at it. The refinement was done by programming a game that ran multiple iterations of encounters with the vector field at different settings and letting the AI experiment and use metrics to optimize the settings. Trying different settings, measuring results, and applying lessons learned (conceptually close to Six Sigma).

Target selection in the end was a simple matter of predicting return on investment (ROI) – another empirical exercise. If the cost of engaging a target outweighed the benefit, don’t attack. The trick was developing the values of different behaviors; and the trade off between tactical advantage versus strategic outcome. Once developed, the computer automatically analyzes all known targets and engages the targets that have the best strategic effect (as weighted by the values programmed in) while avoiding battles it can’t win until it has more resources to take on harder targets of value. If set up correctly, it will allow the AI to ignore unimportant targets of opportunity (red herrings) in favor of strategic targets. Again, something that is hard to manage when you only have one set of eye keeping track of hundreds of units on the map.

Path Planning. One lingering bug StarCraft has; when left to their own devices, units on the move can get stuck on walls or in corners, especially when traveling long distances. For a human player this is a small annoyance, but for an AI, it meant they had to develop their own agent to plan and control the path and movement of units. Once they had Path Planning, they combined that with the danger avoidance agent, and they could have multiple scouts constantly traveling around the battlefield, with good situational awareness given by crossing lots of terrain, but high survivability from being able to avoid known and suddenly appearing danger.

With that high level of situational awareness, the resource planner is able to adapt resource planning and prioritization based on the behavior and resources of other players. (i.e. If an opponent starts building air power, you need air defense and vice versa.)

And danger aware path planning and high situational awareness also allowed the hit and run swarms to circumvent patrols and penetrate small gaps in defenses and quickly wipe out strategic targets before opponents could respond. This level of awareness is kept in a precise database giving a more exact awareness than the limited attention and memory that forces a Human player to act on memory and instinct.

Purely by following what made sense in programming the AI for the competition; the Berkley Overmind Team developed a network centric swarm that won the competition over other strategies. Which repeats similar research done in the defense community by Rand and others. Makes you wonder if anybody on the Berkley Overmind team was aware of network centric warfare or not. I’d love to ask that question.

A Culture of Innovation

In terms of AI. The first obvious innovation is seen in the results of the competition. Many AI’s were able to utilize and defend against many of the unconventional tactics used in professional play; but also showed unexpected adaptation and decision making to unexpected situations and strategies.

Within the somewhat limited environment of StarCraft, the AI’s had managed to make decisions and successfully solve problems using a mixture of processes and procedures. Businesses would be so lucky to be so effective and efficient in their decision making. Given a clear set of rules and relationships, the computer was able to succeed in surprising ways. Or as one article put it, “Most interesting of all, the contain-harass-expand strategy was a completely emergent behavior.”

Secondly, one of the articles mentioned going forward, after the competition they will be publishing the source codes of the AI’s as part of the proceedings of the conference. The idea being that each year the competitors will be standing on the shoulders of the giants from the previous year; instead of reinventing the wheel every year you get an innovative and escalating arms race. In a few years, I’d expect to see some very sophisticated AI’s simply because each competition is building on the previous year’s work.

My Wish List

Well, first I’d love the chance to play some of these AI’s. In fact if I was one of the teams, I’d be tempted to set up a server that people could connect to and play. While there is a potential counter intelligence concern there, the amount you could learn by looking at replays would really improve your learning curve, especially if you have a learning AI playing a variety of human players.

Second, I’d love to participate in the competition somehow. But given how rusty my limited programming skills are, and how limited my time is already; I doubt I could produce a work product comparable to what dozens of university students can produce over the course of a year. But as an avid Star Craft Player and more importantly Strategy Researcher, I’d happily do pro bono consulting just to get to participate in such a cool experiment.

Ghost Tactics

Combining their hit and run behavior, threat tracking, path planning, and scouting used by Berkley’s Overmind AI gives a wonderful view of the battle space where you put your strengths precisely against the enemies weaknesses. This would make Sun Tzu proud.

It also is a variation of one of my favorites from the Strategy Bag of tricks.

In the book Conventions of War: Dread Empires Fall by Walter Jon Williams, the Author postulates a space navy tactical method co developed by 2 characters; called either the “Martinez Method” or “Ghost Tactics”. Is actually a very similar concept if a little more sophisticated than what the Berkley Overmind used. This is a mathematical technique that applies great for things like Star Craft and Naval Warfare, but more creatively could be applied to other military or even business environments, as always, the trick would be in proper application of the model.

Ghost tactics is similar to the Berkley Overmind overall effect. You track all the known positions of all the units, obstacles, etc. Create a 4D Vector field showing the areas over time of each units weapons effect and ranges, sensor effect and ranges, and use that data to generate a constantly updating Convex Hull (This makes me glad I signed up for that differential geometry elective in college). Simply put, a Convex Hull is a path showing the intersection of two different overlapping data sets (typically represented by vector fields or shapes). The idea is that you create 2 data sets. First an enemy data set showing where and when they are strong and weak. You create the same data set for all of your units.

Giving the 2 data sets knowing where and when all the safe and dangerous places are, relative to each individual unit, changing over time and as new data comes in. You create a convex hull in the computer overlapping all your strong positions with all the enemies weak positions. You prioritize them by the best and worse places to go. The Berkley Overmind basically accomplished this result in real time without resorting to complex geometry.

Now the Author Walter Jon Williams takes it a step further, suggesting you move your forces along that convex hull with a path planning algorithm that uses a chaos based function to maneuver randomly across that convex hull, so the opponent cannot predict where you will be or anticipate your strategy, beyond that you will always have your forces lined up where you have a tactical and strategic advantage. Great for attrition, but I’m not sure how you reconcile unpredictable target selection with high value target selection.

Sounds great in theory. Would be fun to try using a convex hull and chaos theory to make a highly dynamic and unpredictable AI, always wanted to see what that would look like and how well it would hold up in the real world.

Combined Arms

This is likely already on the way. Just like in the real world, the advantages given by using different weapons in a complimentary fashion will likely show up soon in the AI competition. The one I would really like to see is complimentary use of special abilities certain units have. Apparently the Second place team had Terran Workers constantly repairing units in battle, and gave that AI a competitive advantage only really overcome by old fashioned attrition.

OODA Loops

I can hear the skeptical half of the military community groaning already. But there is two applications of OODA that I would love to see in this context.

1 – The 30 second battle plan. Not sure how they do it now, but as detailed in One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick; a decade ago Marine officer training taught officers to make their OODA loops faster. The idea being if you could plan and begin a battle plan, or for that matter change a battle plan in 30 seconds, you could react to a changing battle field faster than the enemy, and eventually out maneuver him. In the AI competition, ironically this would probably result in a programming exercise to optimize and tighten code for the purposes of making decisions and making analysis faster; ideally to be able to react and adapt faster than your opponents.

One possibility would be to code Ghost Tactics to compute the Convex Hull in the Graphics processor; which is specifically designed for differential geometry computation (assuming the competition server has a graphics card installed).

2 – Shock and Awe. I doubt you will demoralize an AI through fast attrition. But if you can hit an AI with different problems very quickly; you should be able to confuse it or slow down it’s decision making, may be even able to get it into decision lock, simply by giving it more problems than it can deal with. Now you’d have to be an expert in AI psychology (i.e. a Programmer) to do this properly. But it should result in some interesting effects if you can figure out how to pull it off.

Well, That’s all I have. The future is coming. If you believe the world is flat (or at least that I’m not the only person who reads outside my industry) I guarantee you people in the Defense industry are already looking to adapt the techniques from the Berkley Overmind into use of drones and C4ISR systems (I would love to use the Berkley Overmind to control say a few dozen Predator Drones on Patrol, you’d need human eyes to verify targets and give attack permission, but still at the very least would be a great way to determine path planning for scout drones, and maybe even to coordinate them on tactical offensive in a large scale conflict). Some aggressive financial types may even be able to translate those algorithms into highly adaptive and competitive day trading software somehow (they already figured out high frequency microsecond trading). When It comes the SCADA, I’ll just say I’m curious what could be done with smart SCADA, I’ve heard of several half baked failures already. But I’m a Post Modernist at heart, have to mix everything together and see what ideas I can adapt from unrelated places. I’m looking forward to seeing more good things come from the Star Craft AI Competition.

Thanks for Reading,

Your humble wishing he had more time to write and do research strategist,

Ted S Galpin

Posted in Games, Military Strategy, Strategy | Tagged AI, competition, star craft, strategy, tactics | 4 Comments

Strategic Science on the Competitive Intelligence Podcast!

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Ted Galpin

First thing – sorry for the months without posts. The site got hacked while I was out of town, followed immediately by a nice contract that’s using 50 hours a week (paying jobs come first), and did I mention that toddlers benefit from time and attention. I had to create the opportunities to actually plug a bunch of holes with the website and reinstall the database (and all the work) from scratch, get past the learning curve with the new company, and start writing and formatting posts again.

That being said, some good things happened since the last post;

1 – New look and improved site
2- Read “Ghosts of Cannae” great book, Book review to follow soon.
3 – The interview I did with August Jackson and the Competitive Intelligence Podcast has long since been posted. The interview is available at the CI Podcast as well as on iTunes.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, August Jackson has been hosting the CI Podcast out east for many years now, and has become a bit of a pundit in SCIP as well as the greater CI community. It’s a very informative and helpful podcast I’ve been listening to for years, and was very flattered by August’s invitation.

August wanted to discuss an early post “The Problem with Competitive Intelligence.” The interview was very fun, covered allot, and was a great use of a Friday afternoon (and Skype).

So if you want to hear the voice of strategic science and get more in depth ideas on “The Problem with Competitive Intelligence”, Please check out the podcast.

Thanks!

-T

Posted in Business Strategy, Intelligence, Self Help | Tagged august jackson, ci podcast | 3 Comments

Top Ten Strategy Tricks: #10 Schwerpunkt

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Ted Galpin

Top Ten strategy Tricks — Really our ten favorite strategy concepts.

Here at strategic science we have a bag of tricks — mostly different strategic techniques used for intelligence, planning, execution and adaptation. Things like SWOT, PESTL, five forces, value chains, PERT, Gannt Logic, Mett — TC, C4ISR, The Kill Chain… etc.

Given our time available, a full analysis of even one let alone 10 methods would be so long nobody will read it.

So we’ll cover one item at a time, Abe Lincoln style (like a woman’s dress, long enough to cover up, but short enough to keep interest). But we’ll give you the full list now so you know why you’re coming back for more. And one quick warning, our favorite tricks here at strategic science tend to be unorthodox with an anti establishment interpretation.

10 — Schwerpunkt
9 — Wedge’s Instant Strategy
8 — Action is faster than reaction
7 — Instinct over Facts
6 — Ghost Tactics
5 — Rational Self Interest — The 90% Rule
4 — OODA Loop
3 — Stand Alone Complex
2 — Bad News First
1 — The Fourth Turning

Bonus tricks beyond the Ten: Complexity Theory, Deception Science, and the Macho YoYo.

Schwerpunkt

First in the top ten series

We are putting Schwerpunkt at number 10, because it’s so important it needs to be mentioned first.… Probably belongs as number 1 or 2 if ranked by importance.

“An operation without Schwerpunkt is like a man without character.”

–Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg

Schwerpunkt is German, translates literally to “hard point” or “difficult point.” The term originates in Clausewitz’ “On War”, where Clausewitz uses it to mean strategic objective, goal or destination.

Schwerpunkt has been adapted by different translations as focus of effort or center of gravity; a somewhat different concept used in modern military doctrine; notably the vastly different interpretations of American COG and German Military Schwerpunkt. Their stuff works, but it’s much more complicated than what we need for strategy.

In strategic science as always, we go to the roots of the term — a hard point, the schwerpunkt is the unmoving target of your strategy. The one thing everyone is working toward.

In the business world, schwerpunkt is typically implemented in the form of visions and mission statements. And here I have to give Herb Rubenstien credit; he says a strategy
should always be something you can state in one sentence. That sentence is your schwerpunkt.

So what?

So a schwerpunkt is your strategic target. It could be controlling Baghdad in 72 hours (US Military in 2002), Obtaining 15 Million subscribers (Dish Network), or selling consistent quality fast food across the globe (McDonald’s). Simply communicating the schwerpunkt to everyone participating in the strategy allows them to use their own judgment in how their responsibilities align to the schwerpunkt. And it is the target used to determine priorities and relevance of efforts. If your using resources in such a way that don’t point towards your schwerpunkt, why are you using them?

Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary Japanese swordsman wrote prolifically on sword fighting; often noting if your goal is to stick the pointy end of the sword into the other man; any fancy techniques, motions, or theories that distract from that simple goal are useless.

Application

This should be obvious upon inspection — a simple sentence that establishes the destination or central goal for the organization provides just enough guidance that the leaders and individuals of the organization can fill in the gaps of the strategic plan and executive guidance that always appear in execution. Better, a well communicated schwerpunkt allows multiple leaders to independently and simultaneously adapt strategy to changing situations immediately coordinated by a common schwerpunkt — without senior leadership getting in the way.

Examples

Most common example are the contest reality shows like Iron Chef or Project Runway. The challenge is to often to create a result around a central theme (i.e. schwerpunkt). Judges frequently ask the losers why they ignored the schwerpunkt and went off on some random tangent that had little to do with the scope of the challenge.

My personal example of how a shared group schwerpunkt allows enhanced uncommunicated group coordination was simply meeting my friends for a movie. Freshman year of college, everyone scattered across the state at different colleges and jobs, bunch of disorganized 19 year old’s all agree to meet at the same theater in the city for the 5:30 pm big action movie premier they all wanted to see. Sort of a reunion. Well, this was the early 90’s before cell phones and email, so communication was a challenge.

I got stuck in friday afternoon rush hour when I hit town, and got there about 5:29 PM, about a minute before the big movie started. I was not alone. About 3 of us showed up about that time. There was no way we would get a seat, odds are the new movie would be sold out right?

Well, it didn’t matter. Because we had solid commitments, a firm roster, and group trust; one guy patiently was waiting outside the theater with 3 extra tickets in his hand, and the rest of the group had bought extra sodas and were saving seats inside. All that coordination simply thanks to saying yes to a friend on a 20 second phone call a few days earlier. The Schwerpunkt was to get the gang back together to see a ceratin movie at a certain time; and everyone indepedently corrdinated efforts and picked up each other’s slack to make it happen smoothly despite a lack of communication.

Beyond the question

Simply put, having a schwerpunkt is not enough. It has to be clearly communicated, and used as the priority and central value in decision making. Just like every other wasted strategic plan, it only works if you actually use it and act on it.

See you next week,

Thanks for reading, your humble strategist,

Ted S Galpin

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

The Difference Between Intelligence and Espionage

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Ted Galpin

An outside the box strategic discussion by Ted S Galpin

The Difference Between Intelligence and Espionage.

Is a matter of life and death.

(2016 Bonus answer – because this article gets a ton of traffic – here’s the direct answer:

Intelligence is information gathering.

Espionage is illegal. When you break the law to obtain information (secrets).

Or grey area illegal involving lying, cheating, stealing, misrepresenting. Unethical or Immoral behaviour that risks lawsuits and making enemies is espionage or borderline espionage. The Society for Competitive intelligence has guidelines and a code of conduct for this sort of thing. People protect secrets for reasons. Stealing secrets is espionage.

The classic SCIP example is if an anonymous source sends you an unmarked package full of your competitor’s secrets – it’s unethical espionage, and potentially illegal if you keep and use the package once you understand what it is – it makes you an accessory to espionage. SCIP at least used to recommend you return the secrets to their owners, and act in a honest and trustworthy fashion. Which is good advice in a context where you can’t kill your enemies, also know as the civilized world.

A kid that steals their older sister’s diary is a simple example of basic espionage, because if trivial, it is an act of stealing protected secrets and their are consequences if you get caught. The remaining old article illustrates the real world consequences of intelligence and espionage.)

I actually had some fun stuff planned for this week’s article, but catching up on the news changed my mind. As a cute comedy song pointed out in 2004, America is so spoiled now that obesity is an epidemic.

Really? Just think about that. We have it so good that one of our most difficult challenges as a society is eating too much.

About 1.7 Billion people live in Poverty. That basically means about a third of the earth isn’t sure where their next meal is coming from. And Americans are dying from overeating.

So what does that have to do with intelligence and espionage?

Well, consider American are so spoiled we are dying from overeating. How else are we spoiled? One could say most Americans view the world through Disney colored glasses; War is an abstract idea we see in movies; crime is rare and the police handle it. Eating, heat, and electricity are a certainty, even air conditioning and internet access are a certainty these days. The worst thing most people can imagine is losing their job.

The rest of the world isn’t so fortunate. War, Plague, Famine, and Death are common. Life is cheap, guns cost less than food. Children fight wars started by parents that died before they could know them.

I’ll spare the statistics and numbers because this is depressing enough already. The point is people need to remember how dangerous a place the world is when they start interacting with it, or their mistakes will get somebody killed.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like having a death on my conscience. Not if I could have easily prevented it, or worse yet contributed to it.

Definitions
Recent Events
The Reason Why
Witness Protection
Did it make a difference?
Walking The Line
Crossing The Line
Who Pays the Price?
The Ethics and Morals of Information
Outcomes

Definitions

Intelligence is about gathering information and analyzing it so you can make informed decisions to accomplish your goals. Sounds simple eh? The trick is some problems are complicated, and some information is hard to find or understand. That is why we have business intelligence, competitive intelligence, defense intelligence, national intelligence, etc. People figured out that news and opinions make great entertainment, but you need intelligence analysis to really make a good decision and anticipate the consequences of your actions.

Espionage is about dangerous intelligence; i.e. secrets. These are things that people are willing to fight to protect and protected by laws. Most business secrets really aren’t that big a deal, and domestic industrial espionage is a hard to quantify activity often resulting in legal action and people losing jobs.

You get out into the world; espionage is considered a matter of national security, is often a military matter, and people kill to protect their secrets. Often because those secrets keep them alive. Osama bin Laden doesn’t want his location to be known, because if it is, a bomb will land on it. That’s a simple example of the information people are willing to kill or die for.

Obviously most Americans don’t do those sort of things or think in those terms. If they do, they often wind up in jail or worse.

The last technical term is “redaction;” basically a fancy word for censorship of secrets. That old TV show where “names are changed to protect the innocent” is a great example of redaction.

Recent Events

So what started all this?

Wikileaks is an international organization based in Sweden that calls itself ” a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public.”

Earlier this week Wikileaks released 90,000 secret US military Afghan war intelligence documents it obtained to news sources, and made about 75,000 publicly available online. To their credit Wikileaks did make an effort to try and redact the documents to reduce any negative impact. The media reaction has been significant, talking through the details and reaction.

The Reason Why

Wikileaks, much like the modern media and journalists is all about freedom of information, transparency in government, and fighting corruption; all while protecting the sources that provide them with information.

So basically they don’t like secrets, and honestly do provide an important governance function to help keep the powers that be a little more honest.

But the question is did they accomplish that this time?

Did it make a difference?

Well, according to both the Washington post and former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, no. All the media outlets are reporting that the wikileaks information only confirms what we already know:

– War is worse when described by people on the ground than by politicians.
– There are civilian casualties in war.
– Pakistani Intelligence is hard to work with.
– The Taliban are getting stronger.
– The American backed Afghan government has problems with corruption.

All things we’ve known for a long time, and most of them mentioned in my previous article on Afghanistan.

Despite their mission statement; Wikileaks didn’t give us anything new to work with. The “whistleblowers” are being investigated by the military. All they provided were some historical records that don’t change the American Politics at all, but will probably get the people Wikileaks is trying to protect arrested. Not exactly good for the reputation is it?

Witness Protection

Here’s the whole point of what I’m writing. The difference between intelligence and espionage is witness protection. When people are willing to kill to protect their secrets, what do they do to the people that tell you the secrets?

When you use a person as a primary intelligence asset — that is you ask them to spy and conduct espionage on your behalf; there’s usually an implicit social contract that you will not endanger the life of your source or their family; otherwise why would they risk themselves to share the information with you?

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US Military has easily thousands of civilian intelligence contacts hiding in plain sight, covertly providing us with information on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Most are likely civilians who live in areas frequented by our enemies, or who conduct business with our enemies.

Wikileaks redacted the names. But reportedly the dates and places and details are there, free for download on the Wikileaks web site. You want to know how the US learned about the meeting where your brother got killed in Kandahar? Now you can read the Pentagon file on it. It’s like trying to remember the name of the guy who puked in your sink at that party in college. If you were there and you know all the people involved, it’s not to hard to connect the dots and start figuring out the names of who’s talking to the Americans.

Wikileaks just compromised the lives every contact we have in the region, and the lives

Walking The Line

The Hacker community is the original “Set the information free” culture. In the same week as this Wikileaks controversy is going on, Adrian Lamo, a well known hacker, had a similar opportunity this week, and handled it very differently. He took the hard drive filled with 90,000 secret documents provided by an Army intelligence analyst, and returned it to the military. He said “I went to the right authorities, because it seemed incomprehensible that someone could leak that massive amount of data and not have it endanger human life,” as quoted by CNN.com.

But the hacker understood the consequences of publicly releasing that information — people would probably die.

He understood the difference between intelligence and espionage.

Crossing The Line

Funny that the hacker with a criminal record was worried about the witness protection issue. And Wikileaks only did enough to protect the identities of American soldiers.

And what did they get out of it? There has been no change in our view of Afghanistan or American politics due to the leak. All they did was get credit for the largest leak of military secrets ever, and consequently endangered the lives of thousands of Afghan and Pakistani contacts and their families.

Who Pays the Price?

In an article on CNN.com former 4 star general and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden called wikileak’s release both stupid, and a tragedy.

Most of the sources mentioned in the 75,000 released documents now have to wonder, how good are their enemies at connecting the dots? How do they protect themselves and their families?

The American military and intelligence community has lost it reputation for protecting it’s partners in the region. Remember the next time you work with the US government, your interaction will be documented, and who will be looking for pay back when your deeds come to light?

So the US will probably lose most of it’s spies in the region, and has lost credibility for recruiting new ones. Doesn’t exactly help us fight terrorism.

The Ethics and Morals of Information

Ironically this is probably something best understood by hackers and intelligence professionals. The Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals even have a careful Code of Ethics that addresses the consequences of controlling information.

Anybody who trades in information, be they a journalist, an intelligence professional, or an idealist like wikileaks really needs to understand the responsibilities and consequences of that trade. And part of that is deciding how and when to responsibly report the information you have without jeopardizing the lives of innocent people.

I would argue that “The people have a right to know,” does not take priority over the obligation to do no harm. We might all benefit from journalists and groups like wikileaks developing an ethical standard like the hippocratic oath.

But real point is, if you traffic in information — in intelligence, journalism, or otherwise you need to understand the difference between intelligence and espionage, or you will get people killed.

Outcomes

If I were a Taliban or Al-Qaeda strategist — I now have 75,000 classified US Military reports that tell me what my enemies know and don’t know. What they are good at and what they are not good at. And best of all, it gives me more than enough information to purge (kill) every source of primary intelligence the Americans have in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and probably the surrounding parts of central asia.

The Wikileaks download is actually an amazing resource for making a strategic assessment of the US Military in Afghanistan.

The American military now enjoys a reputation as not being able to protect it’s allies.

And Wikileaks has proven at least in this case, that to take credit for a good scoop, they will release information that does no good whatsoever, but does plenty of potential harm.

Wikileaks has proven they don’t care if their leaks get people killed.

Makes you wonder, are they stupid or just selfish? Does it make a difference?

The only thing I can say — is with “friends” like these, who needs enemies?

The take away here is in intelligence, the danger is your typical business risk. But espionage connotates laws being broken, and life threatening danger. Those who work in espionage often risk not only their lives, but for the compromised contacts in Afghanistan, likely their innocent families are in danger as well.

The difference between intelligence and espionage is simply the level of risk you take to get the information you want. You chase secrets and start breaking laws, you crossed the line.

And the corollary to that is likely the higher the risk, the greater the potential to inflict harm.

And information professionals have a moral and ethical obligation to not compromise the safety of innocent people. That’s a message Wikileaks needs to hear.

And to the point, Wikileaks needs to take off their Disney colored glasses, recognize how dangerous the world is and learn the difference between intelligence and espionage, so maybe they will think twice before they endanger thousands of lives by releasing sensitive information that has no productive effect on the world.

Thanks for reading,

Your humble strategist,

Ted S Galpin

Posted in Competive Intelligence, Geopolitics, Intelligence, Military Strategy, Strategy | 5 Comments

You don’t know Sun Tzu

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Ted Galpin

An outside the box strategic discussion by Ted S Galpin

You don’t know Sun Tzu

Well, actually maybe you do. But Probably not the same way I do.

I’ve been working long days on the strategy book, and Sun Tzu certainly takes some time to internalize. There’s a saying — “there’s nothing new under the sun.” That’s true in science, especially strategy. Today we are talking about what the military calls “net assessment.” It happens to be the first chapter in Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” You’ll probably recognize these ideas from business theories out there, it’s a common and often poorly executed concept in strategy and intelligence.

Assessment is the details of “Know your self and know your enemy, and you will win a thousand battles.” If nothing else, you need to have a holistic assessment of where you are and what you face; or what you don’t know will likely end you.

Sun Tzu has the best method for assessment I’ve found (though I have found many adaptations or reinventions). There’s nothing new under the sun.

And sorry it’s a little late, had some technical problems to remedy. Hopefully this is worth the wait.

Sun Tzu Bing Fa?
The problem with Sun Tzu
Tao —Purpose & Values
Tian — The Environment
Di – Situation & Position
Jiang — Ability of Decision Makers
Fa — Methods & Technology
Balance of advantage
The take away
So what?

Statue of Sun Tzu in Yurihama, Tottori, Japan (compliments of Wikipedia).

Sun Tzu Bing Fa?

You’ve probably heard of it as Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the Chinese classic now ingrained in popular culture. Most have no intention of reading it, and those of us who try get headaches. However it is well regarded across the globe as the oldest and most authoritative work on strategy. So in strategic science we work through the headaches to try and unlock the enigma.

The Art of War is the English title as translated by Lionel Giles, the first authoritative English translation made in Britain 100 years ago, dedicated as a gift to his brother, a military officer at the time.

The Chinese title is “Sun Tzu Bing Fa.” The literal translation can be made as “Master Sun’s Competitive Methods” or more appropriately “Master Sun’s Strategy.” The “Art of War” however is a far more romantic and poetic title, that reflects the martial nature of the text (and likely a choice influenced by Machiavelli’s work of the same name).

The problem with Sun Tzu

Is understanding what he left behind.

The context

Is largely ancient Chinese feudal kingdom survival, around the warring states period. The Strategic theory is married to the military science, and rooted in Taoist philosophy. So many dismiss the book as military science or Chinese philosophy; rather than general strategy (It’s actually all three). Scholars often stress that the idioms are largely Taoist and easily misleading to western readers.

The language

Is hard for fluent scholars. And literally ancient. Any given character in the text has multiple meanings, some of which don’t directly translate well to English concepts. Just skimming the chapter title translations on the Wikipedia page shows the difficulty of precise translation for simple 1 or 2 character chapter titles. It was written poetically on bamboo strips, reputably with mathematical logical relationships that don’t really translate to English text (especially considering most translators are linguists and historians, not mathematicians versed in translating Chinese formula into western mathematical symbols. And who buys a math book on Sun Tzu? I’ll bet there is a small audience for:

ƒ(advantage)=(assessment)X[(purpose)(climate)(position)(leadership)(technology)]

(Though personally I really miss the proofs we did in topology and abstract algebra, and enjoy that sort of exercise.)

Anyways,

The Thomas Cleary and Gary Gagliadri translations very carefully admonish that without a knowledge of Chinese language, cultural idioms, the historical context, Taoism, and the structure of the original text, understanding even a very good English translation is challenging.

So that leaves me spending a few weeks with several different copies of The Art of War, Gary Gagliardi’s handy transliteration of the Taiwanese Military’s complete version of Bing Fa, and my dog eared copies of Tao Te Ching and Tao of Pooh, and hundreds of online searches to try and make up for my western education.

Starting with the original Chinese Characters, in true strategic science fashion the exercise here is to find the general core concepts in Bing Fa and present them in precise simple language.

Master Sun’s 5 Principles of strategic assessment

Tao — Purpose & Values

Tao translates to “Way” or “Path.” Seeing that Taoism is a subject onto itself, we will tread lightly. For strategic assessment, in the context of measuring an organizations competitive advantage, Tao is the organization’s purpose and values.

This is important in terms of both strategic alignment of action, and achieving maximum compliance from your people. People fight harder for a cause they believe in. And in both eastern and western thought there is often a moral advantage considered in a higher purpose. You can make similar arguments using incentive based game theory and rational choice on the advantage of a motivating purpose and shared values.

How hard do I work on unpaid overtime that only keeps my boss happy and earns some faceless executive a bonus? By comparison, how hard do I commit myself when I’m helping my friends or family? That’s why volunteers defending their homes often enjoy significantly higher combat compliance then invading professional mercenaries. Protecting your family and home is a much stronger motivation than following orders, plunder, or fear of punishment. Like wise how many of you know executives that bad mouth the company’s mission statement, core values or code of ethics? Why would you trust or risk yourself for leadership that does that?

The first assessment is who has the most advantage from the effectiveness and alignment of the their organization’s purpose and values?

Tian — The Environment

Tian translates to “heaven” or “divine providence.” It’s like asking who’s side nature is on. When Master Sun recommends to discuss heaven he means what are the advantages and disadvantages that no one controls. These are external conditions of the climate, season, or environment like weather, the economy, regulations, laws, and commodity prices. Trying to find business financing in 2007 is very different than 2009. Seasons may change, but they are also beyond your control.

So which organization enjoys more competitive advantages from the nature of the environment? The classic example is the strategic military advantage that Russia enjoys in the winter. Hitler and Napoleon both failed to invade Russia because they failed to consider the harsh Russian winter. On the other hand, the long Russian winter ices over ports, complicates logistics and working conditions, and creates an economic disadvantage.

Current environmental business factors are the economy, poor availability of financing, still relatively cheap energy and the potential of environmental regulation of energy. But if you’re hiring there is a plentiful and well motivated labor pool for most skill sets. So a growing company, if it can find capital, would enjoy cheaper growth costs and better staffing today than say 5 years ago in a different climate.

The second assessment is the natural environmental factors and who gains an advantage or disadvantage from them. Timing is everything.

Di — Situation & Position

Di translates to “Ground,” “Place,” “Situation,” or “Position.” Or as the cliche’ goes “Location, Location, Location!” These are the external conditions that can be chosen or controlled. You may not be able to control the weather, but you can choose the time, place, and position of your battles. This can be fighting downhill or locating your factories near cheap foreign labor. The Red Barron’s dog fighting positioning based on the Dicta Boelcke is great example — if possible keep the sun to your back, and attack targets from above and behind.

Michael Porter’s Five Forces analysis is a popular technique for assessing a business market position. It considers the positions of your suppliers, customers, existing competitors, new competitors, and substitute products; and can be used to determine how to position yourself to succeed.

You can choose when, how, and where you compete. Is the position close or distant? Do you have room to maneuver? Is the position easy or difficult to obtain and control? Find a position where you cannot lose.

Obviously positions change. A west facing hill side is a great uphill advantage until the sun sets in your face and blinds you. Or you can simply be unable to maintain you position and lose it. Competition is often about fighting over advantageous position.

The third assessment is who enjoys the most situational or positional advantages.

Jiang — Ability of Decision Makers

Jiang means the “general” or “leadership.” Master Sun uses it to mean the ability of decision makers. Assess the decision makers’:

Intelligence. Are they knowledgeable and possess good judgment? Can they make quick decisions? Do they have the right skills?
Trust. Do they inspire trust? Can they be trusted? Do they trust their subordinates?
Love. Do they take care of their people and care about the cost of victory?
Bravery. Are they willing to take the right risks and stand up to their fears? Do they inspire bravery in others? Are people willing to fight for them?
Discipline. Are the able to do the right thing at the right time consistently without oversight? Do they maintain consistent discipline, incentives and expectations in the organization?

Now this may be the most subjective part of the assessment, but typically speaking, human resources and customer satisfaction benchmarks alone may speak volumes. Here the trick is not to judge by reputation, rather by evidence to the above criteria.

The fourth assessment is the ability of the decision makers.

Fa — Methods & Technology

Fa translates to methods, skills, practices, techniques, or doctrine. For the purpose of strategic assessment it means skill level and effectiveness of your methods, and the effectiveness of the technology used. This is how good your organization is at what it does, and the quality of it’s tools and weapons. How strong, how fast, how effective are your processes, logistics, and end products? How well trained are your people?

As John Keegan wisely argues in his book “Intelligence in War” even when good intelligence is available, you can’t win a battle if you don’t know how to fight. When competition gets fierce, the stronger competitor always enjoys that advantage.

The effectiveness of your methods and skill at executing them is one of the single most important advantages you can have.

Technology cannot be dismissed. In 480 and 490 BC invasions of Greece, the Greeks technological advantage over the Persians was simply the Hoplite heavier armor and weapons. Greeks used longer spears, and metal shields; Persian spears were shorter, their shields were wicker. Nobody realized the advantage of stealth technology and modern American air power until tested against the world’s 4th largest military during Desert Storm in 1991.

However, new technologies that complicate processes and require significant training are often a competitive disadvantage. A wonderful example is BYD who figured out how to make superior products with inexpensive Chinese engineers and labor intensive manufacturing methods; beating out competitors using exotic processes and industrialized robotic manufacturing.

The subtle context of this is training. Superior technology and methods only work if the people have the training to use them to an advantage.

Methods and technology may be difficult to measure directly; like leadership you may have to measure them through indirect means, or simply test their effectiveness through direct competition. But you can figure out who’s got the advantage and what it is.

The fifth assessment is who’s methods, technology and training give greater advantage?

Balance of advantage

Master sun then advises you add up all the advantages and disadvantages found in the assessment, and you will see who has the overall advantage. If your measurement of assessment is accurate, you can predict the winner.

For example, In WWII the Nazi’s enjoyed home field defensive advantage, more experience, more sophisticated methods and best of breed technology in most categories; but superior technology, a more experienced army, and home field advantage did not make up for poor purpose and values, not to mention intentionally disorganized overlapping leadership that could not execute an effective strategic decision without Hitler’s micromanaging approval.

The final assessment is the net assessment. Add up the advantages and disadvantages on each side, and you’ll have great insight into who will win, who will lose, and why.

The whole point of net assessment is to holistically understand everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can maneuver your strengths against your competitor’s weaknesses.

The take away

As I said at the beginning — probably nothing there that hasn’t been said in a dozen business management books. Sun Tzu just nicely brings in all together in a couple of pages.

Once you’ve made the five assessments, Master Sun challenges the net assessment:

Which political leadership holds the right purpose and values?
Which management posses superior skill?
What season and position provide superior advantage?
Which method of command and control works best?
Which force is stronger?
Which people have better training?
Which incentives and discipline are most consistent and clear?

These tell you who will win and who will lose. If you want to win, You need to develop an organization that is competitive on every above point, e.g. the five assessments and the net assessment questions. If you are assessing strategy for competition, this is how you identify the key strengths and weaknesses.

This net assessment should make it obvious what you need to do to win. And just as importantly, what won’t work (please, never again try competitive entry into Russia during the winter).

Now here’s the trick. Assessment of your internal business is probably handled by finance, business analysts and business intelligence. The assessment of business competitors is probably done by either market research, competitive intelligence, or lacking that, a couple of proactive leaders.

That should show an obvious disconnect. If your internal analysts and external analysts are different departments, with different goals, methods, and values… Then your business is probably incapable of making a valid net assessment.

So what?

If, and only if you can coordinate and combine internal and external scopes of business to align, measure, compare, and contrast your internal assessments with your external assessments; then, and only then have you legitimately completed the step so fundamental to strategy that Sun Tzu put it on the first page of The Art of War.

If you don’t have a strategic assessment, or worse, your strategic assessment is patched together from unaligned work products from different groups — then your strategy won’t be based on the relevant facts; and will likely fail when those facts determine competitive advantage.

If you’re looking for something useful for the competitive intelligence folks to do? Have them do a net assessment, and have them start on your internal assessment first. That will provide the template for external assessments.

But how do you use that everyday? What does this actually mean for you as an individual?

Well, if you want to enjoy personal competitive advantage. Consider your purpose and values. Are they working to your strategic advantage? Think about your environment, what is the timing good for? Where can you position yourself? How do you rate on the 5 abilities of decision makers? Can you improve your abilities? What methods and technology do you have available? Can you improve them? Simply understanding these principles for yourself, your family, and the groups you work with will allow you to be better at anything you want to do.

If you ever find yourself in a competitive environment, you can then make the comparative net assessment of your opponents and obstacles to best align what you have, to the opportunities for success that your competitors provide you with.

Thanks for reading,

Your humble strategist,

Ted S Galpin

Posted in Business Strategy, Military Strategy, Strategy | 3 Comments

The Problem with Competitive Intelligence

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Ted Galpin

An out side the box strategic discussion by Ted S Galpin

The Problem with CI

When keeping up with the CI practice, a common theme is CI falls on deaf ears and is heavily under utilized. How do you fix that?

In a nutshell, if you don’t maintain a close relationship with your CI customers, especially executives, how do you know you are giving them what they need, and why should they trust you? It’s important to know that in CI, executives are very complicated and important customers, not static subscribers to a newsletter or blog.

CI?
The CI Mind
The Executive Mind
CRM
Turning Enemies into Friends
Primary Intelligence and Secondary Intelligence.
The Best Practice

CI?

For those not familiar with CI, CI is competitive intelligence. Defined by the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals as: “Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of monitoring the competitive environment and analyzing the findings in the context of internal issues, for the purpose of decision support.”

Literally, keeping leadership informed on everything they need to know to keep the business competitive and successful. CI according to that definition needs to know how everything in the company works, everything that happens inside and outside the company relevant to the business, what the needs, expectations, and desires of leadership are; and what needs to come to the attention of the decision makers to make informed decisions. Good intelligence often has summarized analysis, options, recommendations, and the risks and consequences associated with them.

The CI Mind

Competitive Intelligence professionals are smart.

Let me take that back. CI professionals are VERY smart. They are up there with scientists and engineers. They tend to be very technical, precise and wonkish (technically pedantic). So just like scientists and engineers they tend to be very good at what they do, understand all the details, intricately comprehend the value or their work, and can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t appreciate and understand their work and utilize it properly.

But there is a problem with being the smartest guy in the room.

The Executive Mind

Now consider for a moment the typical executive mind. They are obviously smart and good enough to get and keep the job, they are not dummies. The average executive is equal parts arrogance, ability, overworked stress and insecurity from fighting to get and keep their job. Most executives are not trained or groomed for the position. The get promoted on merit and do their best to keep up (Google “Peter Principle”). Most of the execs I’ve worked with put in 60 — 80 hours a week, answer several hundred emails a day, and have to keep track of several hundred responsibilities and issues, including little things like budgets, hiring and firing, responsibility for profit and loss, and surviving competitive internal politics on top of competitive business. They answer work emails on their blackberries on nights and weekends. Its always interesting to see a string of emails that started at midnight, bounced between 10 people in the middle of the night and hits you in box at 4am with a note from your boss saying — “Urgent, address this first thing when you get in the office.”

It’s a very hard job, but good for workaholics, and many use perks like golf meetings, lunch meetings, generous vacations, Marriott points and big bonuses to manage stress.

Here’s the point, say you are a experienced executive, you’re under the gun trying to compete and and prevent layoffs in a difficult economy. The CFO keeps beating you up on your budget, the VP of HR is hounding you to get evaluations out, and the CEO wants to know why your group isn’t performing as promised. You are under tremendous pressure and have plenty to lose (all the perks and that great salary).

Then some geek from some dark corner of competitive intelligence walks in, quickly compresses 6 months of research and analysis into a 10 minute power point summary, and then expects you to do something with it. You think there’s probably something to this, this CI guy is certainly smart and could probably do your job. And worse, while you’ve spent the past few months in meetings and fire fighting, here’s some genius analyst that had the luxury of a few months to figure out everything you’re probably doing wrong or ignoring.

How do you take advantage of this without looking stupid? How do you explain this to anyone else when you’re not quite sure you get it? How do you maintain authority if you start asking CI dumb questions? How the heck do you know you can trust this CI? Where did it come from? Is it worth risking your career to stick your neck out acting on this intelligence you barely understand done by somebody you barely know?

Even worse, say the presentation is done to a room full of competitive and nervous executives. Nobody wants to appear stupid or weak, executives already know everything right? So everybody pretends they understand, talks around the issue, and unless they are part of a very progressive and sophisticated corporate culture, odds are their best self interest is to simply ignore the intelligence report after the meeting, maintain the status quo, and hope either it goes away or the CEO does something with it. Acting on it is not worth the risk, even if it looks good.

CRM

CRM in this case is customer relationship management.

CI professionals, like their engineering and science cousins, tend to enjoy research and analysis. CI can never understand why nobody uses their analysis when it’s obviously very right and very important. “If I’m right what does politics and relationships have to do with anything? It’s sitting right there in black and white; just read it!” That’s classic engineer mind.

CI will happily spend months in a dark basement doing calculations and figuring out answers to questions. However in the same technical personality, most CI professionals don’t seem to take the time to understand their audience, the corporate politics, or more importantly how to get their customers of intelligence to value and utilize the product. No marketing or sales, just the thud of the report on a desk. That’s why competitor profiles are so popular an intelligence product, they may be next to useless and time intensive, but everybody at least understands them.

And If I’m an executive that instinctively hates and fears every group of smart people that threaten my ability or political position, keeping a group of expensive CI analysts busy doing work with negligible return on investment is a good way prevent CI from becoming a threat, and maybe even get rid of them during the next budget cut.

So how do you win over an audience that probably hates and fears you?

Turning Enemies into Friends

Fundamental Sun Tzu, this is Psyops 101. The Green Berets actually have many books on the subject and call it counter insurgency. A politically savvy CI group will engage and communicate with it’s executives and decision makers in person on a regular basis. That means stop by their office at least once a week, talk to them, get to know them, understand their needs, and support them directly. If you are located to far away to talk in person, phone calls work too (They did for me across three time zones and 5 states). For CI to survive, they need to embed themselves into the leadership process and mind of the company. That’s internal customer relationship management. In fact using a CRM tool to track and prioritize internal needs for CI may be appropriate in large organizations.

The take away here is competitive intelligence needs to work their audience like human intelligence assets. You need to keep them happy, secure, informed, and even dependent on you.

Primary Intelligence and Secondary Intelligence.

For those unfamiliar, Primary intelligence means getting information by talking to people, Secondary intelligence basically means reading it some where (often on line). Modern CI practice is overly reliant on secondary intelligence, and from what I’ve seen with SCIP (the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) Primary intelligence is actually rarely if ever used in the current competitive intelligence practice.

Most Savvy CI folks know that executives and anyone with customer or vendor contact are an invaluable source of primary intelligence. Easy primary CI is called having lunch with business development every week.

No decision maker is going to trust secondary intelligence from some analyst in another department. But if your CI liaison that visits your office three times a week volunteers useful information on that new account your working, that’s a totally different animal.

And if CI actually comes to you as a source of Primary intelligence on a regular basis, trusts your insight, and is happy to talk shop, exchange notes, fulfill ad hoc requests and feed your ego; of course you trust them, their work is based on your input and you talk to them often! Executives need participation with and ownership of CI to trust it. Depending on the size of your team and organization, the CI leader may just walk the halls and stick his head into every office everyday; or maybe you need to assign analysts to stop by every stakeholder in the company, then coordinate CI needs and strategy in a CI staff meeting based on liaison internal primary intelligence. Maybe based on personalities of CI staff, some people will stick to full time secondary sources and analysis while others maintain CRM with the CI audience. A simple best practice is to have everyone in CI maintain an internal primary intelligence network of peers in every department of the company — this will provide invaluable primary intelligence, give multiple stake holders into the CI process and product, and keep CI very familiar with the “context of internal issues.”

But however you do it, CI needs to think more like spies, and start treating any stakeholder in CI as a primary intelligence human asset that needs to be maintained, supported, and utilized on a frequent basis if CI really expects to have a large impact on executive decision making. If everybody knows and trusts you, the research and analysis becomes the hard part of the job. If you use your network to informally support research and analysis; you can get informal buy in early on at multiple levels in your intelligence cycle. Imagine having different executives explaining different parts of analysis to the group in an executive intelligence review meeting.

The Best Practice

If you work in CI, and you’re not the first person your executives call when they need an informed opinion, you’re honestly not doing your job. Imagine you stop by a VP’s office, and he is frustrated by a problem. After letting him vent for ten minutes, you as a CI professional can quote him what the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and Stratfor have to say on the subject, plus you can quote the internal metrics, compare them to industry benchmarking, mention that a guy down in IT you talked to the other day was working a similar problem for HR, and maybe we could get some synergy by expanding the scope on the HR solution to support a competitive need. And you know from research for the annual competitor analysis, that if implemented well, the solution would actually give a good edge on your primary competitor. You know some of the strategic initiatives are under budget, and you think there may even be available budget for it. And you are practiced at articulating these insights to the VP that you talk to often and share a common vocabulary with.

CI should be in so tight with executives, that they are familiar with the content of intelligence presentations weeks before the meeting, so your audience is informed and taking action at the meeting, not confused virgins trying to figure out what it means. You do that by maintaining the customer relationships, knowing their expectations, and keeping them constantly informed, in person, by talking to them.

That’s what CI should be. If you are still maintaining static reports that get published to people with no time to read them — guess what, your CI has little if any impact on the company; it’s tactical or random at best. If you can informally form strong relationships with all your stake holders, literally by just walking into offices and saying, “Hi, my name is Bob, I’m with competitive intelligence, my job is to answer questions, what do you do, do you know where I can get information? How can I help you?” and go from there. Don’t show them your CI products, just learn their job, form a relationship, and see what problems they have that CI can help with. Simply engage their ego and get them talking. You’ll be surprised what happens from there.

It worked for me on more than one occasion. I’m hoping it can work for you.

Thanks for reading,

Your humble strategist,

Ted S Galpin

Posted in Business Strategy, Competive Intelligence, Intelligence, Strategy | 20 Comments

In Afghanistan, there are no coincidences

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Ted Galpin

In Afghanistan, there are no coincidences.

An outside the box strategy analysis by Ted S Galpin.
Reprint from July 2nd, 2010

This week we’ll talk about Afghanistan, mainly because current events make it too fun not to. Last week I originally started doing a detail referenced thesis on Afghanistan, but realized that Stratfor has already done that, so I’ll stick to a concise value add here.

A Quick overview

The situation on the ground.
What’s up With McChrystal?
The reality of COIN
The Bigger Picture.

In Afghanistan, there are no coincidences.

In the movie “Ronin” Robert De Niro plays a laid of CIA spy in post cold war Europe freelancing to pay for retirement. It’s a good 90’s spy flick. One simple take away that has stuck in my mind for over a decade now; “There is no such thing as coincidence.” If you Google the quote you’ll see it’s popular in both action fiction and philosophy. It may not be a mathematical fact of the universe, but strategically it’s an excellent habit to question coincidence, or in general when ever something happens have the habit to analyze why. Or be willing to have the why surprise you down the road. If you assume there are no coincidences, it should help you mitigate many potential unpleasant surprises (Hmmmm, it’s midday in a China town street market and there’s no one to be seen, why am I the only person on the street? A coincidence?).

I would hazard to suggest, in Afghanistan there are no coincidences.

A Quick Overview

After the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States quickly unleashed every resource at its command in the prosecution of Al-Qaeda and the Capture of Osama Bin Laden. It started as a very elegant and sophisticated over throw of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the destruction of Taliban and Al-Qaeda strongholds. Leaving both groups on the run.

That was 2001. Since then the western political aim of the Pacification and Stabilization of Afghanistan has been a continuing debacle of political and military inconsistency. No strategy or amount of military force has been able to secure Afghanistan since the 1970’s. Afghanistan is historically a location of geopolitical importance as a crossroads of central Asia on the silk road.

So geopolitically, Afghanistan is relevant to the security and economics of Iran,Russia, China, Pakistan, and India. Please note the first nation on the list is trying to become a nuclear power, the other 4 already are. The West views Afghanistan as a security threat because it is currently the home of international terrorism, i.e. Al-Qaeda. Most of the population is traditionalist and anti modern living a lifestyle that has not changed in 100 years or longer. The Economy is currently based on Opium Agriculture (meaning a largely criminal dominated black market financing our enemies) or foreign aid, though the US Military recently finished a geological survey that identified huge heavy metals and fossil fuel deposits that could transform Afghanistan into the richest mines in central Asia.

That’s the 3 paragraph summary.

What’s up With McChrystal?

Odds are he just wanted out. Consider:

Last week the guy running the campaign in Afghanistan, 4 Star Major General Stanley McChrystal respectful resigned his responsibility for Afghanistan under pressure from President Obama for “Behavior unbecoming of a senior officer,” specifically candid remarks challenging senior leadership attributed to him in a very impressive article in Rolling Stone magazine.

So Who’s Stanley McChrystal? Based on a variety on online sources, mainly Stratfor, the exceptional Rolling Stone article, and Wikipedia (which I confess is known to be dubious at times) — McChrystal is a snake eater — to say he is a very scary, intelligent and deadly special forces warrior. He comes from a military family, served his early career with the 82nd Airborne and 75th Rangers, is a West point Graduate, a Green Beret, gave Pentagon military briefings to the media during part of Iraq, and before Afghanistan was the officer in command of Joint Special Forces command, directly responsible for some the greatest success in Iraq. As a 4 star General he was known to pick up a rifle and go on night patrols in dangerous areas with regular soldiers. Simply put McChrystal is a serious bad ass, known as basically a hard headed, free speaking jock with little patience for politics.

Then general message the popular media has delivered in editorial and commentary was this Patton like warrior was unfairly taken advantage of by a very savvy Rolling Stone journalist. That the poor General with a history of speaking his mind and bucking the system was a victim of the modern practice of behind the scenes exposure in journalism.

Well, if you read the Rolling Stone article, McChrystal was described as a workaholic in Afghanistan who never stopped to eat or sleep for over a year. Then consider the new COIN (counter insurgency) strategy is progressing very slowly; and that Afghanistan is starting to look more like Vietnam than Iraq – to say the US Military tactical dominance is in a strategic quagmire. We never lost a single battle in Vietnam, but we didn’t win that war.

One story in the Rolling Stone article was very telling. A soldier from a forward deployed base didn’t like the new rules of engagement under the COIN strategy, and emailed Gen. McChrystal a challenge to go on a night patrol with the platoon. So McChrystal showed up and went on patrol with them to make the point.

Well, a while later one of the guys in a platoon was killed in a firefight. The good general visited the platoon to pay his respects. While there, in front of a Rolling Stone reporter he spent an afternoon trying to explain and sell COIN to the platoon, but couldn’t get through to them.

So the new strategy in Afghanistan is slow to gain traction. McChrystal has been shooting his mouth off for the past year, usually making the Whitehouse look bad; to the extent that several political analysts are surprised McChrystal didn’t get fired sooner. While hordes of journalists are apologizing to the military, warning to be careful of what you say on the record, they guy who just spent a few months being tailed by a Rolling Stone journalist just got the president to ask him to retire at age 55 from a battle he cannot win, and is enjoying the first full night of sleep, relaxed meal, and time with his family he’s had in years.

You ask me the warrior that didn’t know how to quit instead convinced his boss to reassign him. McChrystal probably has accumulated well over a year of vacation pay under DOD rules, and as a four star gets a very comfortable pension. He’s 55 and can consult for a few hundred an hour as he likes. And every pundit I’ve read agrees that the army has plenty of suitable replacements fir McChrystal. And all they did was take him off of Afghanistan, right now he’s still an active Major General.

One of the most powerful men on Earth, a master strategist, fighting a quagmire war — hires a civilian consultant to bring in and baby sit a Rolling Stone reporter given unrestricted access to the free speaking general. Bringing in Rolling Stone was probably McChrystal’s personal exit strategy. He didn’t quit, he never said never, he simply pushed the politics to a breaking point in a way that won’t reflect poorly on his military career, only his political one.

The reality of COIN

Here’s the Military point. The only known strategic technique that works consistently against insurgencies, i.e. rebellions and civil wars is COIN or Counter Insurgency as developed by western militaries over the past few centuries.

In simplest terms, COIN is a direct marketing campaign to sell a populace that our policy is better than the insurgent’s policy. Basically selling them peaceful modern democracy instead of the current war. Asking tens of thousands of basically trigger happy 20 something’s in full body armor (American soldiers) that don’t speak the local language, to execute a direct marketing campaign to sell democracy to a large scattered population of rural tribes does not exactly have good odds of success.

Now there are a few hundred Green berets over there with college educations and COIN training that speak Pashto and Urdu, and are very capable of making COIN happen.

We just don’t have enough of them. Even then they are trying to sell the dubious Karzai government as being better than the Taliban, when everybody knows the Taliban will win the day after the US Military leaves. Karzai is not an easy sell to the Pashtun people in south Afghanistan. Nobody is willing to take charge of Afghanistan, but the US government is not willing to give up either. McChrystal obviously was getting tired and frustrated, and figured he’d keep pushing the politicians improve the situation until he either got a winnable scenario, or they fired him for pushing too hard. But as a good soldier who wanted to win, unable to control policy, he did the best he could with the options available.

McChrystal did his job – Win the battle or die trying. In this case the job was mostly a political one, and so was the death.

The Bigger Picture

So we have to ask, what is the endgame here? What is really possible?

Well, a quick Google search suggests that we are spending about $100 billion a year on Military operations in Afghanistan, about half of that is “extra cost” and about half is what we’d spend on the thousands of soldiers to do their work somewhere else.

You have to ask, as of this writing a double dip recession is looking more and more probable. The Krugman inspired deficit spending is weakening the federal budget in the name of Keynesian stimulus — and regardless of your economic philosophy, there is a hard road with lots of public and private debt in a weak Global economy ahead. As John Mauldin is fond of writig these days, there are no good decisions left, only pain now or pain later.

So ask you what is the Return On Investment of spending an extra $50 — $60 Billion a year on Afghanistan ? Does it buy us that much security? Does help keep the military strong? Is it good for the people in Afghanistan ?

If the US Federal government is spending $3,550 Billion a year, and is forecast to collect only $2,381 Billion, we might want to think about saving money, instead of throwing good money after bad in a central Asian war that has no end in sight.

Consider According to the Human Development Index, Afghanistan is the second least developed country in the world. How much does it cost to build a nation? And what do we get for our investment? 4 nuclear powers plus Iran effectively if not literally border Afghanistan. Yet they are not invested like we are. But they benefit the most from an economically prosperous Afghanistan. All those heavy metals and fossil fuels will be sold to Afghanistan’s neighbors, if and when they are developed.

So as Americans we probably need to have the discussion. Is a continued quagmire of nation building and terrorist attacks in the North, and a full blown COIN war in the south, is it worth $50 Billion or more annually to the American people?

If the US budget is in trouble, the US economy is in trouble, and we are looking at a long recession; why are we spending billions every year to continue the longest war in US history trying to rebuild a central Asia nation from scratch? Are there less expensive ways, more geopolitically responsibly ways to protect us from terrorism? Can we negotiate with the Taliban sonner than later under a decade of COIN momentum to end this? Can we still get what we want if we do?

These are questions that will hopefully be debated loudly and publicly in the coming elections. As a nation can we afford to be the world police? Can we afford to build nations in the current economy?

Thanks for reading,

Your humble strategist,

Ted S Galpin

Posted in Geopolitics, Intelligence, Military Strategy, Strategy, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Strategy bogged down by reality?

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Ted Galpin

Strategy bogged down by reality?

A personal note. Ok seriously, one of my problems is getting “looped” by the everyday grind.

Let’s step back a moment. What do I mean by looped?

I need to explain John Boyd, his OODA loop, and a little historical context.

In brief, John Boyd was an Air Force Colonel, reputably one of the best fighter pilots ever, and a significant military theorist of the 20th century. He’s known for being the primary contributor to the F-15 and F-16 programs; and he invented energy maneuverability theory, which is the primary rule of engineering when designing a fighter plane.

One of Boyd’s most prominent ideas is the “decision cycle” or “OODA Loop”. Which is a basic model of psychology, based on learning theory, about how we interact with the world around us. All it postulates is that human decision making includes the following steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

i.e.

Observe. I see a hamburger place down the street.
Orient. I like hamburgers, and I’m hungry.
Decide. I want to eat a hamburger now.
Act. Pull over and order a hamburger.

It’s a simple model of psychology that has been shown to accurately describe human behavior. It is most obvious when observing small children (because it often happens slowly).

In most strategy literature, in a conflict one wishes to outpace and disrupt or manipulate the opponent’s OODA loop. Be advised that the OODA loop is actually very simple psychology, but is often misinterpreted and misused, especially in defense circles where arguments of interpretation abound. OODA loops are a good model for showing how initiative works, both in parametric and literal contexts. Speeding up your own decision cycle is often known as taking the initiative, and is commonly taught in Marine officer school (as 60 or 30 second battle plans).

Every day I observe things that need to be done, orient to the daily grind, and totally lose sight of my schwerpunkt (strategic objective). The thing is — the daily grind is tactically relevant to my schwerpunkt, and much of it is needed to keep customers happy and business going. But I’m just constantly looped by tactical (immediate) issues… So tactical urgency loops my strategic priority. I’m busy all day doing important things, but have problems getting around to the “value add” projects I’m working on.

How do we prevent getting looped by tactical urgency?

That’s my question.

In the invasion of Iraq in 2002, the coalition schwerpunkt was to control Baghdad within 72 hours. Why 72 hours? Simple, that’s the time limit of how long a soldier can fight without sleep. A 72 hour sprint to Baghdad followed by rest and regrouping. The 72 hour sprint has such speed, so many things happen so fast as to loop the defenders — i.e. you get inside their decision cycle. You are moving so fast they just can’t keep up with the changes. In OODA terms you give them to many things to observe and orient to, and they ideally go into decision lock. They get overloaded by a quickly changing environment and you can do whatever you want. The doctrine of “Shock and Awe” is literally based on OODA loop manipulation.

So what does the invasion of Iraq and OODA have to do with getting bogged down at the office?

See, Marines like to fight. They train for it every day. They are really good at it. In the invasion of Iraq in 2002, I’ve been told one of the strategic challenges was the Marines got bogged down with fighting when they should have been racing to Baghdad. I have a similar problem with morning emails.

When Army units hit resistance, they simply avoided contact, called in an air strike, and kept focused on the strategic objective — take Baghdad in 72 hours.

Meanwhile the Marines did lots of fighting that slowed them down. With rather spectacular tactical success, they won lots of unimportant battles that really slowed down the race to Bahgdad. They had a tendency to get looped by tactical urgency. Simply put they got distracted by combat and forgot their strategic objective.

The cliche’ goes something like: I’m so busy fighting off alligators I forgot that the reason I jumped in the swamp was to drain it.

The thing the Army did better than the Marines in 2002 was simple. They picked their battles and delegated tactical urgency while staying focused on their strategic objectives.

HR calls that priority management. You can Google techniques. You can keep a priority/urgency matrix. You can have a sticky note, reminder, poster, whatever to remind you of your strategic goals.

But you always have to ask yourself, is this the best ending for my story? Is the fire I’m fighting now going to prevent future fires? Is this the best use of my time, can it wait, should it be ignored or delegated while I focus on larger priorities?

Simply put you need to prioritize your action items with your schwerpunkt as the primary value, or you’ll get “looped” by the daily grind, lose strategic initiative and fall behind schedule… May even start losing the war because you are fighting the wrong battles.

The hardest decision leaders have to make, and frequently in business the common mistake — is picking your battles. And not politically, but tactically. Most managers and executives get so caught up in tactical and operational problem solving and fire fighting that they get looped by circumstances and lose all if any strategic orientation to their work.

How many meetings have felt like a waste of time? How much of your daily fire fighting at work actually makes money or strategically positions your success? Or are you just putting out fires as fast as you can with no strategic objective?

Target fixation or micromanagement? Is micromanagement just a form of target fixation where you let tactical urgency dictate your priorities? Are you doing everyone’s details for them without managing the big picture?

Now we can argue lack of top down strategic focus another time. In what you do, every decision you personally make, first have a schwerpunkt (or schwerpunkts) in mind. And ask yourself, is what you are doing just tactical urgency to gratify your personality? Or are you accomplishing a significant return on you investment of time into achieving strategically goals?

Ask yourself, are you getting looped by tactical urgency? Or are you staying focused on the big picture and making progress towards the bottom line?

That is a skill developed by practice. Most people are bad at it. Most people, regardless of rank or experience simply get distracted. Make a habit of framing every decision in terms of strategic priority. For most of us there is more work than time. You only get so many hours in the day. At the end of the month, do you want to say you put out 30 fires? Or that you circumvented the fires and achieved a strategic goal that makes the fires irrelevant?

The trick is to practice strategic focus and awareness. Check yourself at every action, every decision. Ask what is my schwerpunkt? Does this help strategically? Am I being looped? Am I looping myself? Google Cognitive restructuring if your serious about developing the skill, a trained psychologist will know that technique.

In tough times, crazy busy at work, I frequently find myself looped, bogged down by the daily grind, and have to remind myself to reorient to my schwerpunkt and stay aligned with my priorities, because I don’t have the time to do everything, and my limited time is precious. I need to spend it accomplishing goals, not fighting fires that keep burning regardless.

Thanks for reading,

Ted S Galpin

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Posted in Business Strategy, Military Strategy, Self Help, Strategy | 8 Comments

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