Author: sebicer

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Maneuver Warfare: Can Modern Military Strategy Lead You to Victory?


Business has gone through a dramatic transformation in recent years. So has warfare.
Every executive knows firsthand the daunting challenges of the twenty-first-century business environment: rapid and disruptive change, fleeting opportunities, incomplete information, an overall sense of uncertainty and disorder. While military commanders have long faced such challenges on the battlefield, meeting them has be come even more difficult in today’s world of electronic weaponry, blurred battle lines, and amorphous enemies.
Military strategy, like business strategy, has had to evolve in response to the changing environment. This has led to the growing focus on an approach to armed conflict called maneuver warfare. Recognized as a viable combat philosophy for the past 65 years, maneuver warfare risen to prominence in the past decade because it is so well suited to today’s combat environment. Although designed for the battlefield, the approach offers a novel and useful way to think about business strategy, allowing executives to capitalize on—rather than succumb to—the formidable challenges they now face.
Maneuver warfare represents—in the words of the United States Marine Corps doctrinal manual, Warfighting—“a state of mind bent on shattering the enemy morally and physically by paralyzing and confounding him, by avoiding his strength, by quickly and aggressively ploiting his vulnerabilities, and by striking him in a way that will hurt him most.” Its ultimate aim is not to destroy the adversary’s forces but to render them unable to fight as an effective, coordinated whole. For example, instead of attacking enemy defense positions, maneuver warfare practitioners bypass those positions, capture the enemy’s command-and-control center in the rear, and cut off supply lines. Moreover, maneuver warfare doesn’t aim to avoid or resist the uncertainty and disorder that inevitably shape armed conflict; it embraces them as keys to vanquishing the foe.
Despite the oft-cited analogy between warfare and business, military principles clearly can’t be applied wholesale in a business environment. The marketplace is not, after all, a battlefield, if only because lives aren’t at stake. That said, companies do compete aggressively even viciously—for strategic advantage in a chaotic arena that is increasingly similar to the modern theater of war.
Consequently, while the battle metaphor in some settings may seem facile or ill considered, we believe concept of maneuver warfare is directly relevant to business strategy, precisely because it has been developed address conditions that in many ways mirror those faced by modern executives. Furthermore, the approach—with its focus not on overpowering a rival but on outflanking him, targeting his weaknesses, and rendering him unable to analyze the situation—can help a company to achieve a decisive advantage with a minimal deployment of resources. This is of particular interest in today’s business environment, when many companies are hesitant to over-commit their resources.
The Nature of War
Warfare, in general, takes place on multiple levels. On the physical level, it is a test of firepower, weapons technology, troop strength, and logistics. At the psychological level, it involves intangibles such as morale, leadership, and courage. At the analytical level, it challenges the ability of commanders to assess complex battlefield situations, make effective decisions, and formulate tactically superior plans to carry out those decisions.
If these dimensions seem familiar to most business executives, so too will the four human and environmental factors that, according to Warfighting, shape military conflict. Friction is the phenomenon that, in the words of the manual, “makes the simple difficult and the difficult seemingly impossible.” The most obvious source of friction is the enemy, but it can also result from natural forces such as the terrain or the weather, internal forces such a lack of planning or coordination, or even mere chance.
 by Eric K. Clemons and Jason A. Santamaria
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Napoleon Strategy works

 

Napoleon Speaks on Increasing Market Share.

Napoleon Bonaparte is still studied for his military axioms and tactics. Most marketers realize that marketing is a form of warfare — albeit without the national imperative or the mortal risks. At Stealing Share, we look for clues anywhere we can find them and we study success (as well as failure) to learn both the lessons and pratfalls. Napoleon has always held a special place in our mythology because his pithy military quips provide an innate understanding of human nature and the nature of struggle. Sun Tzu, the revered author of the Art of War has been studied by marketers for more than two decades — as you will see, Napoleon deserves the same treatment.

”One bad general is worth two good ones”

Napoleon was referring to the importance of being single-minded in both process and purpose. What is interesting about the statement is that he did not compare one good general to two good ones — he compared a bad one to two good ones. In marketing, focus and single-minded intent is the best predictor of success. When you build a brand to steal market share, deciding on a single mission is often your biggest hurdle. Human nature tells us that all too often we are too close to the situation and this subjective vantage point makes it difficult to see the situation dispassionately. Find and then stick to a single focus. Where might Miller Lite be today if they had decided between “great taste” and “less filling.” Trying to be all things to everyone is a recipe for disaster. A great market position not only informs the target audience whom you are for, it proclaims as emphatically whom you are NOT for.

“Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never.”

Napoleon might well be referring to the struggle all businesses have in managing scarce resources. For example, resources like time and money. When planning a successful campaign Mr. Bonaparte realized that time, was his scarcest commodity and that hesitation often preceded disaster. In building a brand strategy to increase market share, timing is everything and victory often belongs to the swiftest. Speed is rarely the ally of the market leader. Often the market leader is encumbered by entrenched process and expensive infrastructure. They are wedded to the status quo. When opportunity peaks its head above the entrenchment… it is time to strike.

“It should not be believed that a march of three or four days in the wrong direction can be corrected by a countermarch. As a rule, this is to make two mistakes instead of one.”

Once again, Napoleon was referring to focus and intent. We find, as we evaluate business strategies for our clients, that often as not, they once possessed a single-minded brand strategy that would have led to market leadership had they seen it through to the end. Instead, they second guessed themselves and “marched back in the wrong direction.” Entrepreneurial companies are strongly at risk for this error in strategy. Often as not, their verve and early success came as the result of the individual force of presence of a creative founder or president. Harnessing this energy and not allowing it to loses focus is a great challenge. More often than not, patience, focus, and absolute commitment lead to success. This axiom has as a prerequisite careful planning and measured risk.

“If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur.”

The ability to analyze risk, uncover opportunity, and plan to exploit the breech are the skills that every marketing department needs to foster. Can you look dispassionately at the situation? Are you able to see opportunities even if the path seems to lead in a different direction than your processes currently lead? Do you see your brand mission as a servant to customer beliefs of business process? Can you see opportunity when it may, at times, look like adversity? Napoleon asks us all to do our due diligence and homework. At Stealing Share® we have a simple process. 1) What are the goals? You must have specific goals and know, precisely what it is you wish to accomplish. How will you measure your success? 2) What are the problems and obstacles? Can you look with an objective eye and be willing to see the problems? What if the “problems” are part of your process? What if the obstacles are an investment in an equity of no importance in the mind of the target? What if the problem is a foundation upon which your business model is built? Seeing them enables you to fix them. 3) What are the solutions? This is often the easy part. The challenge is in identifying the issues and problems. Asking the right question lead to the right answers. Socrates promised us that you would never solve a problem by asking the wrong question.

“The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.”

 Here Napoleon speaks to the heart of marketing and brand strategy. It is the melding of the left and right brain. The ability to understand with logical clarity and to interpret the logic with a creative brush. The same skill that creates a brand strategy or market strategy to increase market share excites the target audience to prefer your brand. It must appeal to both their right and left-brain. All too often we settle for the logical argument because it is the easiest to quantify, but our past success promises us that the emotional values are possibly more important than the cognitive assessment. Most of your customers do not really know why they chose your brand. Likewise, your adversary’s customers do not know why they prefer the competition’s brand. If you ask, they will give you an answer, but often as not, it is far from the truth. Understanding the emotional cues is the difference between winning and losing. Napoleon said it best… “Between a battle lost and a battle won, the distance is immense and there stand empires.”

http://www.stealingshare.com/pages/Napoleon%20Strategy%20works.htm

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Guerrilla Marketing Warfare Strategies

Businesses with small budgets and big goals find guerrilla marketing tactics give them a way to compete with larger companies. The idea behind guerrilla marketing strategies is that smart, creative tactics can increase sales without putting lots of money behind ineffective marketing campaigns. The term “guerrilla marketing” was formally developed by Jan Conrad Levinson, a marketing expert who described the tactics as an alternative to traditional advertising methods.

Social Media

One of the most powerful guerrilla marketing strategies available today focuses on the effective use of online social media tools. Social networking tools range from writing a blog that focuses on your products and services to providing engaging content and interaction on Facebook and Twitter. Persuading readers to share the information with their friends, families and business associates is the goal of a social media campaign. No matter what social networking tactic you choose, providing posts and entries helps convince the buyer that you offer the solution to his problem and encourages him to share the information with other like-minded people.

Entertailing

Providing an entertaining retail experience is a guerilla marketing concept known as “entertailing.” For brick and mortar shops, entertailing helps customers learn about your offerings while engaging as many of the five senses as possible. These strategies help make the store stimulating and exciting so your customers want to come. They also start telling others about their experience so you generate more traffic. Online retailers that want to engage in entertailing find chat rooms, forums and virtual reality experiences help them create an entertaining website to which prospects keep returning until they’re ready to buy.

Outstanding Customer Service

Another important guerrilla marketing strategy focuses on making the customer service experience so memorable that clients keep coming back while also referring people to you. Providing excellent customer service keeps dissatisfied customers from telling everyone they know about their experience and, in effect, persuading potential customers to stay away. This guerrilla marketing strategy requires constantly training your staff to clearly understand your customer’s problems, needs and preferences. Add in a fast response time and consistent, respectful treatment of all customers, and your customers will start sharing their experience with others who want the same level of service.

Developing a USP

Creating a unique selling proposition, or USP, helps identify what makes your product or service different than you competitors’. Once you know the answer, use that information to inform prospects about what makes your company’s offerings the best choice. Your USP may be based on saving time or money, making people’s lives easier or making them feel better. Intangible benefits such as safety and status may also play a role in your USP. Once you’ve developed a list of facts and benefits for your USP, constantly share this information with customers so they start tuning into your product or service and start telling others about it, too.

About the Author

Nancy Wagner is a marketing strategist and speaker who started writing in 1998. She writes business plans for startups and established companies and teaches marketing and promotional tactics at local workshops. Wagner’s business and marketing articles have appeared in “Home Business Journal,” “Nation’s Business,” “Emerging Business” and “The Mortgage Press,” among others. She holds a B.S. from Eastern Illinois University.

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Marketing warfare strategies

Marketing warfare strategies.

Marketing warfare strategies are a type of strategies, used in business and marketing, that try to draw parallels between business and warfare, and then apply the principles of military strategy to business situations, with competing firms considered as analogous to sides in a military conflict, and market share considered as analogous to the territory which is being fought over. It is argued that, in mature, low-growth markets, and when real GDP growth is negative or low, business operates as a zero-sum game. One person’s gain is possible only at another person’s expense. Success depends on battling competitors for market share.

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2- Leadership and Innovation: Relating to Circumstances and Change

Relationship to Circumstance and Change

I distinguish six different ways we can relate to our circumstance and the changes occurring all the time.  I claim that the way we relate to our circumstances becomes the foundation for our being leaders and opens or closes possibilities and opportunities for innovating.  If we consider that change is a constant and always occurring whether we know it or not, then we might also say that these six ways of relating to the circumstances are also ways we relate to the world  and become the contexts within which we deal with everyday life.  These should not be considered as progressive steps in a process.  Rather, these are different “states of being” or contexts available to every human being, at every moment, to differing degrees depending upon our commitments, concerns and

competence in various domains of action.

RESISTANCE – Opposition to circumstance

Probably the most common way we relate to change is to resist it.  To resist means to stand apart from whatever one is resisting and judge it as ‘not being as it should be’.

We resist in many ways: we can resist by simply disagreeing with a new policy, for instance, by analyzing something over and over again, or by playing devil’s advocate with no ownership of the issue.  Resistance can be overt or covert, sometimes we can resist by agreeing with someone and then gossiping when the person isn’t around.  We can procrastinate, argue, rationalize or even sabotage a change initiative simply by ignoring it and waiting for the next change to come along.

Whatever strategies or patterns for resistance we have, whether overt or covert, conscious or unconscious, active or passive, they have three things in common: First, all forms of resistance are “counter-innovative” and thwart human intentionality to create/own

change.Any effort spent in opposing what is occurring moment to moment will blind us to possibility.  Further, resistance gives power to the status quo or cultural inertia that, by its nature, will persist.  This is reflected in the often quoted maxim, ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’.

Secondly, all resistance is rooted in the past and is grounded in a negative mood/attitude and assessment of ‘the way it is’, a judgment that things ‘should be’ different than they are. Our commitments and actions are organized by what we see as feasible and that we know how to do. At best, this will lead to finding effective ways to cope and at worst will lead to a state of chronic suffering and eventually to resignation.

Thirdly, to resist implies that there is some thing “there” to resist which essentially objectifies our world including ourselves and other people, turning us into objects in an objective world.  This reduces us to either being victims of whatever it is we are resisting and/or encourages a ‘spectator’ relationship with the circumstances.  This means we no longer participate in creating the future, and become trapped in a worldview that destroys possibility and power. In this state, innovation is a rarity and an ideal.  When innovation

does happen it is usually attributed to some ‘special-ness’ of the innovator or more often explained as an anomaly that leaves us unaffected, untouched and not responsible for the change.

“Leadership” in this context is exercised through ‘opposition’ to the circumstance. For

the most part, this will prove ineffective to the point of becoming part of the problem. For example, in most organizational or cultural change initiatives, the prevailing rational is that the status quo is “broken” and needs to be fixed. The leadership is resisting the ‘way

it is’ and in a well-meaning way is attempting to ‘fix it’.  The problem is that these initiatives are rarely effective because everything being done to change something is pushing against (resisting) what is already going on.  This is how many issues persist even when there is widespread agreement that something should change.  Essentially the proponents and opponents to a leadership initiative are operating in the same context.

COPING – Positive reaction to circumstances

Coping is also rooted in a view that circumstances are objective and we must somehow adjust our commitments and actions to match what the circumstances allow. Coping might be viewed as a positive alternative to resistance as the coping person works within the circumstances effectively.  Energy expended in resisting is now redirected to

problem-solving and designing ways to overcome barriers to accomplishing one’s intention.  Like resistance, coping is also ‘counter-innovative’ as a relationship to change, but with one big difference: There are many innovations that are conceived as tools or strategies for more effective coping.  In other words, in a circumstantially determined view of reality, coping can drive innovation, but only as a RE-ACTION to the circumstances, not as an intentional force in creating new circumstances.

For example, “organized labor” was invented as a re-action to perceived misuse and abuse of power by owners and managers in the early part of the 20thcentury and has become an integral aspect of how work is accomplished.   In other words, the political- economic ‘institution’ of organized labor was a way for workers to cope with their circumstances.  While we can observe that this ‘innovation’ has produced a lot of value and benefit for workers over the years, it can also be argued that it has done little to build or address the underlying issues of trust and allocation of perceived power in organizational hierarchies.  In effect, the mechanism for coping reinforced and even institutionalized the problem.   Further, we can argue that successful coping solutions will often thwart and even undermine attempts at further innovations.  In the above example, labor organizations have generally attempted to block various proposed innovations in management such as cross-functional training, incentive compensation packages, self- managing teams and commitment-based management.

Leadership in this context is often facilitative and oriented toward reasonable

expectations and interpretations of what is possible and not possible.  In a coping context, leaders will typically be arguing for and justifying whatever limitation seem to exist and encouraging ‘work around’ or ‘in spite of’ strategies for getting things done.  While this

can be positive and produce results, the leader in this case become a well meaning and unwitting ‘co-conspirator’ for individual and organizational limitations.

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1- Leadership and Innovation: Relating to Circumstances and Change

Innovation is one of those words that we all use, agree is a positive thing and for the most part want more of.  However, the term “innovation” like “leadership” seems to defy a commonly accepted definition. There is no shared interpretation of what we mean or what we are observing when we use the terms. Moreover, we lack practices for deliberately and consistently producing “leadership” and “innovation”.  This is evident in the fact that in spite of thousands of books on these subjects, reading and understanding the books doesn’t enable us to be leaders or innovators.

Innovation and leadership are closely related.  Leadership always has some focus on bringing about a better future.  In this sense, leaders are necessarily innovators. We would not normally consider a spectator of the status quo to be a leader.  The term innovation also suggests some break with the ‘norm’ or the status quo.  I will show in this text that an ‘innovator’ and a ‘leader’ are cut from the same cloth, that these terms are distinguishing different but intersecting dimensions of the same phenomenon.

This paper is the first of a series of essays that are intended to open possibilities for developing leadership. It provides pathways for action for those who are dissatisfied with the status quo and are attempting to either improve on existing processes or perhaps accomplish breakthrough results.

To begin, I will make a number of distinctions.  There are obvious distinctions between the innovator (who), an innovation (what) and the process of innovating (how).  This paper’s intent is to illuminate and inquire into the phenomenon of innovation (and leadership) before history judges an accomplishment as innovative or declares a person to be a leader.  The focus will be on the innovator and the context or ‘way of being’ of the innovator. My thesis is that a competency for innovation is a natural by-product of certain ways of relating to the world; the context in which we relate to circumstances and change. I will also distinguish between innovation and art, two terms often used interchangeably. Finally, I distinguish simple change that is a variation of what already exists from profound change that alters the scope of what is possible.

Distinguishing Innovation

To many, innovation is equated with change.  But, this view tells only one part of the story.   Change is happening all the time whether we’re aware of it or not. A random event, insight or an accident may be novel but I do not consider it to be an innovation. What one can observe and do in the context of a novel occurrence or insight might very well lead to innovation.  For example, all of us have had ‘big ideas’ from time to time and done nothing about them only to learn later that someone has succeeded in bringing about

exactly what we had imagined.  This is what might distinguish a leader/innovator from a dreamer.

A more powerful way to think of innovation is that it means:  intentionally ‘bringing into existence’ something new that can be sustained and repeated and which has some value or utility.   That is, innovation is always related to some practical ‘in-the-world’ value. It is about making new tools, products or processes, bringing forth something ‘new’ which allows human beings to accomplish something they were not able to accomplish previously.

Art is creative and may have value to its consumers, but requires no utility to be art.  Art might be seen as the artist’s self-expression or experience of their world. Innovation on the other hand must allow for something else, some possibility or accomplishment or value beyond the innovation itself.   If someone comes up with a new hammer that does what our existing hammers do, then that is a design change and design is an ‘art’. When someone creates a new kind of hammer, however, such as a ‘nail gun’ or a new method for hammering, then we can distinguish that as innovation.  In this sense, we can also see that we can innovate within an art form, such as painting with acrylic at one point allowed artists to create effects that were not possible with traditional oils.

When we create a new tool we are innovating. When we are not innovating we are the tool or the ‘tool’ is an extension of us. For example, the typewriter was an innovation in writing.  At some moment, the typewriter becomes transparent (to both the typist and those concerned with what is being typed) and we simply have a typist typing. The tool appears again only when there is a breakdown or it no longer serves its purpose.  I am claiming that our relationship to the circumstances, especially when there are breakdowns, is the primary factor in determining whether we respond as leaders and innovate, or simply resist or cope with what is happening.

Whether we are speaking about leadership or innovation, our concern is about accomplishing some sustainable change whether large or small, continuous or breakthrough.  While leaders and innovators participate in both kinds of change, I distinguish leadership as always occurring in a context of some intention to create the latter: Breakthrough, to break with the status quo. Both leaders and innovators change the context, paradigm or frame of reference of the innovator/leader and those who have a stake in the innovation. However, another distinction between leaders and innovators comes from the observation that leaders’ actions exist within a context of ongoing relationships with other human beings.

If change is happening all the time and innovation and leadership both imply deliberate acting, then are there (deliberate) ways of being in the world that define our relationships with change? And, is there an “order” underlying such possible ways of being?

  by Jim Selman