Top Ten Strategy Tricks: #10 Schwerpunkt

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

9 responses to “Top Ten Strategy Tricks: #10 Schwerpunkt”

  1. […] It also is a variation of one of my favorites from the Strategy Bag of tricks. […]

  2. […] your team captures the flag. If that that should happen just send some one back). Bravo is the schwerpunkt of Operation […]

  3. RT @stratsci: Top Ten Strategy Tricks: #10 Schwerpunkt http://t.co/HgJ0Klwn

  4. ErickTavares

    My friend, you gotta a great blog here. Keep doing the good work.

    From Brasil.

  5. […] to balance conflicting priorities and limited resources, all while remembering your strategic schwerpunkt ….  Not to mention the grand strategy reality of conflicting strategies and the grand […]

  6. […] Musk’s schwerpunkt always has been to get to Mars.  The rest of the strategy was about making that happen.  While […]

  7. Awes?me! Its genuinely amaz?ng post, I have got much ?lear idea on the
    topic ?f from this ?iece of writing.

  8. Simply want to say your article is as amazing. The clarity
    on your post is simply spectacular and i can suppose you are a professional on this
    subject. Fine with your permission let me to seize your RSS feed to stay up to date with approaching post.
    Thanks a million and please keep up the gratifying work.

  9. […] conflicting priorities and limited resources, all while remembering your strategic schwerpunkt ….  Not to mention the grand strategy reality of conflicting strategies and the […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

%d