Kategorie: Strategy
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Of the Fox and the Lion: Coercion, Cunning, and Modern Power
Machiavelli’s Chapter 17 and 18 are routinely misread. Force without cunning is brittle. Bonds of love break under stress. Here is what actually holds.
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Mercenaries Will Ruin You: Machiavelli on Outsourced Core Capability
Machiavelli’s argument against mercenaries was never about morality. It was about incentives. Apply it to consultants, gig labor, and outsourced core capability.
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Virtù and Fortuna: The Limits of Strategic Control
Machiavelli’s most enduring contribution is the dichotomy between virtù (the part of outcome the strategist controls) and fortuna (the part they do not). Half of action is shaped, half is not. The corporate misreading of which is which corrupts strategic learning at most companies.
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The Void: Strategic Emptiness as Competitive Advantage
Musashi’s final scroll is the shortest and the strangest. Ku is not Zen mysticism — it is the strategic condition of having no fixed form that a competitor can model. Three corporate expressions of emptiness, and the markets where form still wins.
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Hyōshi: Musashi’s Discipline of Tempo
Musashi’s Fire scroll is not about combat. It is about temporal dominance — who controls the rhythm controls the outcome. Three modes of initiative, and the void between intention and action where contests are decided.
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The Way of Strategy: What a 17th-Century Swordsman Knew About Mastery
A duelist who survived more than sixty contests wrote the manual that postwar Japan’s executives read instead of an MBA. Three reasons it still works.
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Schwerpunkt: The Lost Art of Strategic Concentration
Most strategy decks are budget arithmetic dressed up as a plan. Clausewitz had a single word for what is actually happening — and a discipline for fixing it. The lost art of Schwerpunkt.
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Fog of War, Fog of Market: Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Clausewitz’s answer to uncertainty was not better data — it was better judgment. Two centuries later, most boards still demand certainty before authorising action, and most strategy windows close before the data is ready. This piece is about the qualities Clausewitz called coup d’oeil and Fingerspitzengefuehl, and what they mean when the dashboard is incomplete…
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Friction Is the Strategy: What Clausewitz Knew About Execution
Clausewitz’s 1832 concept of Reibung — friction — is not a complaint about execution. It is the structural diagnosis that strategy decks still refuse to internalise two centuries later. Any strategy that does not budget for friction is not a strategy; it is a wish.
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Win Without Fighting: The Supreme Art in Business Strategy
Sun Tzu’s most cited principle is also his most misread. Winning without fighting is not pacifism — it is raising the cost of opposition so high that conflict becomes irrational for the adversary.
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Shaping the Battlefield: Sun Tzu on Positioning Before Competition
Sun Tzu’s most underappreciated concept is shih (势) — the potential energy of a chosen position. The decisive act in strategy isn’t the fight, it’s the positioning that makes the fight unwinnable for the other side.
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Know Before You Move: Sun Tzu’s Intelligence Doctrine
Sun Tzu’s Chapter XIII is a 2,500-year-old empirical claim: foreknowledge cannot be deduced from inside the room. Most companies still get this wrong — and the failure rates are measurable.
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Design for AI: What 40 Years of DFMA Teaches Us About Working With LLMs
Forty years ago, Boothroyd & Dewhurst showed that manufacturing cost was a design problem. Today, bad prompts and failing AI pilots are the same kind of mistake. Here are 7 principles for designing work that LLMs can actually execute.