Business alignment: Manoeuvring to get your ducks in a row
Tactics are considered rational only if they are aligned with some strategic goal, and strategy is considered rational only if it is aligned with some political goal.
‘Get your ducks in a row’ means to be aligned. How does this problem of alignment apply in business strategy? Real ducklings walk in a line behind their parent.
If you have hit too many business potholes are your wheels of alignment now a bit wobbly? What can one of the classics of military strategy theory tell us today about alignment? And, what should be our ultimate aims?
Much of the origins of thought about business lines of attack has its roots in military strategy, all the way from Sun Tzu writings from 2,500 years ago, including a 28-year-old ever creative T.E. Lawrence leading a revolt in the Middle East desert in the early 1920s.
Carl von Clausewitz laid out the foundations of military thinking that is taught to officers in much of the world today. Clausewitz was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic Wars.
After Napolean’s final defeat in 1815 he turned his thoughts to teaching and writing, where his book On War has become a classic of thinking about strategy.
He stressed the idea of rationality; what made sense, and what did not. And, most importantly, the need to be aligned.
Just because a manager can, for instance, break into a new product category, launch a digital service, or begin to open an office in Addis Ababa does not mean that they should. Short-term actions, tactics, have to be aligned with longer term big picture strategic objectives.
“We can understand Clausewitz’s On War as a warning that ‘maximising victory’ is as short-sighted a goal as ‘maximising user engagement’. According to the Clausewitzian model, only once the political goal is clear can armies decide on a military strategy that will hopefully achieve it,” explains historian Yuval Noah Hariri.
“From the overall strategy, lower-ranking officers can then derive tactical goals. The model constructs a clear hierarchy between long-term policy, medium-term strategy and short-term tactics. Tactics are considered rational only if they are aligned with some strategic goal, and strategy is considered rational only if it is aligned with some political goal.”
Tactics have to be lined up like ducks
All of this makes sense, but if you take the thinking to its logical conclusion it gets a bit tricky. Who ultimately determines what should be the strategic aims?
“A tactical manoeuvre is rational if, and only if, it is aligned with some higher strategic goal, which should in turn be aligned with an even higher political goal. But where does this chain of goals ultimately start?
"How can we determine the ultimate goal that justifies all the strategic sub-goals and tactical steps derived from it? Such an ultimate goal by definition cannot be aligned with anything higher than itself, because there is nothing higher,” writes Harari, who did his Oxford DPhil degree thesis on the military exploits of the Crusades.
In business, for a large corporate listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the aim is to maximise shareholder value. ‘Creating and capturing value’ is the maxim of business conquests, both small and large.
In the donor and NGO community the intention is to create a benefit in what economists would call, the ‘realm of the social good’ like a programme designed to raise the household incomes of women small holder farmers.
“What gets measured gets done” is a practical truth. Visualising targets and watching performance on a daily and weekly basis, and constantly adapting can have a powerful impact. But there is always the question about what to measure, where we tend to gravitate things that can easily by quantified.
For the business, the aim is more ‘self interest’, what is in this for me? While other more charitable social enterprises have a wider more [greater good] altruistic aim.
Down through the ages, philosophers have tried to address: What is the intrinsic good? What are we doing and why? “Make money and generate a profit’ to be sustainable, is the [easily measured] aim of business.
But perhaps looking at it from a wider perspective it comes down to the Golden Rule: ‘Do onto others as you would have them do unto you’. Perhaps von Clausewitz would have agreed?
