Manoeuvre: don't fight everywhere

Manoeuvre takes a different approach.

Instead of applying resources everywhere, we concentrate them where they can change the situation disproportionately. This requires something considerably harder than spending money.

Prioritisation.

Most organisations are perfectly capable of identifying ten important things. Strategy asks them to choose two. That's where things get uncomfortable, because saying something is a priority is easy. Taking people, money and attention away from everything else is considerably harder.

Good manoeuvre isn't about doing more. It's about understanding where a relatively small amount of effort could materially change the outcome.

The question should be: Where could we apply effort that changes the game rather than simply adding more activity?

Guerrilla: play a different game

Then there are organisations that don't have scale at all.

That's not necessarily a disadvantage. Small teams often have something large organisations spend enormous amounts of money trying to recreate:

Speed.

They can make decisions quickly. Change direction. Build close relationships. Notice opportunities earlier. Try something without needing twelve approvals and a steering committee.

The mistake is trying to behave like the organisations they're competing against. If you're smaller, your advantage probably isn't that you can do the same thing with fewer people. It's that you don't have to do the same thing at all.

This was important in the early days of The Eighth Mile. We weren't going to win by being bigger than established consulting firms. So, there wasn't much point pretending we were one.

We could move quickly, work closely with clients, bring in trusted specialists when required and solve problems larger organisations weren't particularly interested in.

Different resources.

Different advantages.

Different game.

so which strategy is right?

Annoyingly, there isn't one. That's the point.

Sometimes scale wins. Sometimes concentration wins. Sometimes being small and difficult to predict wins. And sometimes organisations need elements of all three.

The mistake is adopting a strategy because it worked somewhere else without asking whether the conditions are remotely similar.

A strategy that makes perfect sense for an organisation with 20,000 employees might be catastrophic for one with 20.

The better questions are:

• What are we actually trying to achieve?
• What resources do we genuinely have?
• Where are we currently spreading them too thinly?
• What advantages do we have that others don't?
• What are we willing to stop doing?
• And where would concentrated effort have a disproportionate effect?

That last question matters.

Because most organisations I've worked with haven't suffered from a complete lack of resources. They've suffered from resources being spread across too many things that are apparently all priorities.

Eventually, everything becomes important. Which is another way of saying nothing is. Strategy doesn't remove that tension. It forces you to make a choice.

And that's usually where the real work begins.

Additional Resources

The Principles of War - A Corporate Translation We Do Not Retreat"