Strategy and competition
Napoleon
Concentration
Napoleon (France · 1769–1821) — Concentration.
What actually happened?
Austerlitz, 1805. Seventy-five thousand French against ninety thousand Russians and Austrians. He deliberately left his right wing thin and visible, and the allies did what the sight of it invited: they moved weight onto it, which hollowed out their own centre. When they were fully committed he sent his best troops straight through the middle, cut the allied army in two and destroyed each half. French losses around nine thousand, allied losses around thirty-six thousand.
More men where it is decided
The art of war, in his own maxim, is to have more force at the point attacked or defended even when the army as a whole is weaker. Comparisons of total strength are a summary table; outcomes happen at points of contact, and a smaller side can win each of them in turn.
A small team cannot compete across a market and can outspend a large company inside one account. At that point you are the big company.
Their dispersal is something you cause
The columns he beat piecemeal in Italy were not merely careless. His line of march threatened several objectives at once and forced them to cover each. Making the other side afraid to leave anything uncovered is the same act as making him too weak everywhere.
Visible probes in three directions divide their defensive budget three ways. You mean to attack one; they have to hold all of it.
The method runs on a time difference
Beating two forces in turn requires that turning from the first to the second is faster than the two can join. Lengthen the supply, add layers of approval, and the interior position inverts into encirclement. This is how it eventually failed in his own hands.
Any strategy living off a timing gap loses a beat for every layer the organisation adds. Run the old lightning method through a long chain and it walks into a trap.
A bet with no exit written into it
In 1812 he crossed into Russia with over six hundred thousand men and brought back fewer than a tenth. He lost no major battle and entered Moscow. What he had no plan for was winning while the other side declines to concede: an empty capital, a Tsar who would not negotiate, winter.
Write the withdrawal date and the withdrawal number before you enter a new market. Write them while you are clear, because later one more push will feel obvious.
How do I use it today?
List the points where the contest you are in is actually settled. Pick one and put more into it than the larger side puts into that same point, and accept that you are giving up the others. Then, before you commit, write the date and the number at which you stop.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Have more force at the point attacked, even when weaker overall.
In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one.
From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step.