Tactical Offense

Almost any discussion of tactics and tactical operations is probably going to start with a bad analogy, so let me offer the reader one of mine. Consider, if you will, the blade of a saw. It can be a huge lumberjack saw, or a tiny diamond-toothed saw, but it will almost by definition have a number of small, sharp extensions (teeth) that do the actual cutting. By the same token, any military formation, whether it’s a division of thousands or a squad of ten, is made up of individual soldiers who do the actual fighting. This is a key concept to the American Airborne divisions, for example, who refer to it as “Little Groups of Paratroopers” or the rule of LGOPS.

After the D-Day invasion, most of the paratroopers who had been dumped into Normandy were scattered, cut off from their battalions and often even from their squads. Most military units would have been utterly disrupted, unable to function, and would have spent all of their time trying to find their officers and re-form their units. What the Airborne troops did was to form ad hoc groups of whoever they encountered, regardless of their comrades’ unit of origin, engage the enemy, and fight. It drove the Germans to distraction, and the very fact that no one ever knew where or when a little group of American paratroopers might suddenly appear and attack definitely contributed to the success of the landings.

What sometimes gets overlooked in these historical discussions is that all human endeavors come down to the same factor. A company may consist of a dozen different divisions, employ hundreds of thousands of people on five continents, and own more property than some developing countries, but ultimately all of the work is going to be accomplished by individual workers, and the key directives that will accomplish that work will come from the team leaders, foremen, supervisors and group managers on the spot, not from the Executive Offices in some other time zone. If we consider that the function of Army corps, divisions, brigades and so on is to get the individual troops into the position where they can do the fighting, then by logical extension, the purpose of the Management team, the Forward Planning shop, the Human Resources department, the Marketing personnel and the entire Finance section is to get the organization’s line personnel into the right position to do what they do.

Of course, by the same token, the line manager’s job is to determine the requirements of the actual tasks at hand, and direct his or her people to do them (just as the unit commander’s traditional “first duty” is to engage the enemy and fight). In viewing our company operations, it is critical that we as managers remember that for all of our grand strategic planning for the missions we wish to accomplish, the goals we intend to fulfill, and the objectives we want to meet, our “offense” is also inherently tactical in nature, and all of the work will eventually be accomplished by those individual workers on the line…