Strategy and competition
On War
Friction
On War (Prussia · 1832) — Friction.
What actually happened?
In 1812 he was attached to the Russian army and watched the Grande Armee come apart. Nearly half a million men went in and under thirty thousand came out. What struck him was that the Russians had barely fought a proper battle. What destroyed the strongest army in Europe was mud, misdelivered orders, supply carts nobody could find, columns that lost each other, an early frost, and thousands of small things a day that should have gone smoothly and did not.
Friction: the plan always deforms
Every step is feasible on paper and the whole is not, because each link carries a little resistance: fatigue, misunderstanding, weather, fear, a broken axle. Individually trivial, stacked they seize the plan. It cannot be removed, only budgeted for, and armies differ in whether they keep moving inside it.
Every line of a schedule is reasonable and the sum of them is late. Not weak execution: nobody gave friction a budget.
The fog: information is never complete
War is the realm of uncertainty, and three quarters of what action rests on lies in fog. He does not tell you to wait for the picture to clear, because it will not. He asks for a different capacity: judge well on partial and partly wrong information, and then hold to it.
This collides with know your enemy and know yourself head on. Sun Tzu assumes the count can be completed; Clausewitz assumes it cannot.
Centre of gravity
Every opponent has a hub that his strength and his freedom of action depend on: the main army, the capital, an alliance, public support. The core work of strategy is identifying it and concentrating against it. Ten successful attacks on secondary targets are worth less than one on the hub.
Do not turn competitor analysis into a feature grid. Ask which single thing, if it went, would make the whole thing stop working.
Defence is the stronger form
His most counter-intuitive result. The defender holds the ground, has shorter supply, wears the attacker down and has time on his side. Correspondingly the attacker has a culminating point, beyond which every further step weakens him. Napoleon went past his own in Moscow.
Every new city, category and market lengthens the line. Most companies are not killed by a rival; they run past their own culminating point.
How do I use it today?
Add a friction audit to the next plan: list every handoff that crosses a person, a team or a time zone, because that is where the delay actually lives. For any expansion, name your culminating point and the signal that says you have reached it, in advance, because from inside you will not see it.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
Three quarters of the factors in war lie in a fog.