Mao Zedong
Problems of Strategy
Fight the war your weapons allow
Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War (1936)
Someone else's victory does not transfer. This one asks what a method has to look like given your ground, your people and your weapons.
What actually happened?
In 1936 the Red Army was still in the northwest, and two imported methods were in fashion: Soviet field manuals, and the memory of the Northern Expedition. He put both down and asked a prior question. What is the character of war on this particular ground? Against a stronger and larger opponent, the method cannot be the stronger side's method. The essay turns opposition to book worship into a battlefield rule and writes concentrate a superior force and destroy the enemy one by one as an operating order.
Against book worship
Opposing book worship is not opposing study. It is refusing to skip the look at your own ground. How the Soviets fought and how the Northern Expedition fought are other people's answers; imported as doctrine, the first engagement is lost on terrain.
A forty-person company running the org chart of a forty-thousand-person one, or a workshop copying a software release cadence: both are doctrine without ground.
Concentrate a superior force
Concentrate and destroy them one at a time: three against one, finish, then move to the next. Spread out, it looks as though fighting is happening everywhere and nothing is punched through. On Contradiction says what to put down; this says how to place what is left.
Five features shipped the same quarter and not one of them gives a customer a reason to stay. Punch one through first, then start the second.
Your battlefield is not theirs
Where you are weaker and smaller, the method built for parity does not apply. Fighting with the weapons you have is not consolation; it is nailing the method to your actual strength instead of to the strength you are reading about.
A six-person team borrowing a public company's campaign calendar runs out of money and people by week three. Ask what these six can punch through, then pick that.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you are holding a method that won for somebody else, on ground unlike yours.
Ask first: how many of the conditions that method depends on do we actually have?
Where it goes wrong: still running their org chart and their campaign calendar; five lines open and not one of them punched through.
Lines to keep
No investigation, no right to speak.
Someone else's victory arrives without the ground it was won on.
Same situation, other people are asking
We ran the playbook that worked for them and it is not working here.We copied someone else's playbook · all 1 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.