Strategic Defense

I was starting work on a post about the Strategic Defense/Tactical Offense concept a while back, when it occurred to me that unless the reader is a strategy scholar, the concept is probably a bit confusing. After all, there are tactical as well as strategic aspects to both offense and defense, and many management professionals dislike the comparison between military operations and business in the first place, claiming that war is inherently about destruction (and is thus entropic) while the purpose of business is to create wealth (or in the case of non-profits, value). Unfortunately, this is another one of those concepts that has some validity regardless of whether or not we like it, and is probably with a closer look.

The origin of the phrase “Strategic Defense – Tactical Offense” is probably lost in the depths of History, although you can find excellent examples of what it means in the Belisarius series by Eric Flint and David Drake. It should be fairly self-evident, however, that many aspects of a military defense do need to be strategic in nature, or at the very least, worked out far in advance. If our defense requires large ditches to slow down vehicle traffic, for example, we will need time and equipment to dig them; if we require improved armor to protect vehicles or people from new weapons, or bio-chemical gear to protect our troops from germs or nerve gas, we will need time to design, build, test, manufacture and deploy them; if we need to shoot down airplanes or intercept missiles, we will need to give a huge amount of money to defense contractors who will take it and buy large estates in the country and hire expensive lobbyists…

All right, that last bit was uncalled for, but you get the idea. In business terms, many of the same issues apply. Changes in market conditions may require us to produce cheaper, more efficient products, offer different services or levels of customer support, or adapt to new technologies. No single employee or work group can handle issues like these on an ad hoc basis; if the customer wants to buy fuel-efficient vehicles and all we have are 1950s era gas guzzlers, we can’t meet our sales goals no matter how good we are at selling. If government regulations are going to require us to drop our carbon emissions by 50 percent, we’d better have that planned out well in advance; it’s going to require equipment upgrades, procedural changes, and compliance audits.

The ideal form of Strategic Defense is to develop a position where you can’t lose, no matter what your offense does. The classic example is probably the American Colonial forces in the Revolutionary War. The British needed to win outright to recapture the breakaway colonies, while the Colonial government only needed to prevent this – in effect, not to lose would mean winning. People claim that this can’t be done in business without first establishing a monopoly on a specific market, but I doubt that the people who are trying to compete with the iPhone using last year’s tech products would agree with that. Or, for that matter, that the companies that are trying to compete with Google would pay much attention.

If our Strategic Defense has done its work properly, our business units (and individuals) will be going to work with the training, equipment, skills and products needed to successfully compete for our share of the market. Taking advantage of opportunities to generate income and/or take market share away from our competition is still going to come down to the day-by-day operations of our line business units, however, which will always be tactical in nature,

But that’s going to be my next topic…