Note: In composing this article I have drawn on the translations from von Clausewitz’s German text by both Michael Howard, the military historian, and the Boston Consulting Group. Strategy is the necessary response to the inescapable reality of limited resources.
Both comments and pings are currently closed. All elaborations are subplots of this central theme. “Blitzkrieg” = Bewegungskrieg, which was simply a return to what the Germans had wished to do in 1914. Well structured – You’ll find this to be particularly well organized to support its reception or application. . A faculty member at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Tiha von Ghyczy is a fellow of The Strategy Institute of The Boston Consulting Group where Bolko von Oetinger is a Senior Vice President. Strategy, therefore, is about making choices on how we will concentrate our limited resources to achieve competitive advantage.
The Wehrmacht staggered into Austria, and if there had been any resistance, it could have been humiliating. Tactical success probably encouraged the Nazi leadership to go further and further – Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, North Africa, Russia – rather than being content with the occupation of France and Poland. From this crucible the great military thinkers honed the fundamental principles of strategy, and few among those thinkers are quite so revered as von Clausewitz. Thanks, Lexington. War has no "customer," and trying to map business to war patterns can lead to gross distortions. On this episode of Bizcast we’re back in the classroom to learn about Analytics in Action, an innovative master class that brings together MBA and engineering students with representatives from companies such as Viacom and Citigroup to solve real business problems in real time.
“Well of course,” you might exclaim. . In Book 8, Clausewitz seems to argue for moderation in war-making.
Whatever we select for our library has to excel in one or the other of these two core criteria: Enlightening – You’ll learn things that will inform and improve your decisions. I think that the idea of a limited war, where the consequences won’t be as terrible as a total war, has lead to very bad decisions. The 20 Perhaps this is why they’re attracted to false but seductive theories – like blitzkrieg, strategic bombing, and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) – which promise that, in the right hands, war can be a precise instrument of policy.
Strategy, like any other discipline in the modern world, as Alvin Toffler reminds us, requires constant learning, unlearning, and relearning. History Museum), John L. Hancock (American exceptionalism), Less than the Least (William Stuntz archive), Middle East Strategy at Harvard (archive), Uncommon Knowledge (Peter Robinson interviews), Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Concluding Remarks, Clausewitz, “On War”, Book 8: stating the bleedingly obvious, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, The Oster Conspiracy of 1938: The Unknown Story of the Military Plot to Kill Hitler and Avert World War II, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France.
It is holistic. To get the most from your organization’s data, start with the human – not the data.
Background – You’ll get contextual knowledge as a frame for informed action or analysis. War starts when the defender resists, so war can be seen as unavoidable (at least from the defender’s perspective), which of course is different from the attacker’s decision to risk war for the attainment of his “possessive” political purpose. Although it reached up to War, wrote the famed nineteenth-century military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, should not be compared to art, but rather to commerce, “which is also a conflict of human interests and activities.”.
On War, Book 1 by Clausewitz (My interpretation and summary) I have just finished reading On War's Book 1 by Clausewitz. Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France by Ernest R. May captures how surprising German victory over France was in 1940.
What we say here about books applies to all formats we cover.
In such high-stakes choice making, an ad hoc approach will not cut it. It was a very difficult book to read and I think I've made some errors in interpretation (plus grammar and spelling.)
Only 30 percent of employees in the U.S., and 13 percent globally, feel engaged at work, according to a 2013 Gallup Survey. What would their most likely counter-moves be? Remove: Every new thing we choose to do subtracts effort from everything else we do. Many in business have stopped looking at competition as a death struggle.
Then there is the idea of subordinating military objectives to political aims – keeping the military on a tight leash.
He lived in times similar to ours in that business today is in an economic revolution, just as he experienced a military one. Books we rate below 5 won’t be summarized. The Czechs could have put up a very hard fight. The most dangerous choice of all is not choosing. May I ask, what was so false about the Blitzkrieg theory? But the document alone is not the final deliverable of a strategy. Tactics are the use of armed forces in a particular battle, while strategy is the doctrine of the use of individual battles for the purposes of war. The aggressor always hopes for the decisive stroke, but even when successful this can lead to ever more expansive war aims – that is longer war – war starts to guide policy which makes policy dysfunctional since ideally war is its instrument.