Strategic Assessments (9)
Master Sun: “Therefore use these assessments for comparison, to find out what the conditions are. That is to say, which political leadership has the way? Which general has ability? Who has the better climate and terrain? Whose discipline is effective? Whose troops are stronger? Whose officers and soldiers are the better trained? Whose system of rewards and punishments is clearer? This is how you can know who will win.”
Li Quan: “A political leadership that has the Way (virtue) will surely have a military leadership that has intelligence and ability.”
Du Mu: “Ask yourself which political leadership of your own or that of your enemy’s is able to reject flatterers and draw close to the wise.”
Mei Yaochan: “The question regarding political leadership is, who is able to win the hearts of the people?”
Adaptation: By reintroducing the value of comparison we are being encouraged to remember that the assessments are to be used to arrive at a relative understanding of contrasting strengths and weaknesses in the balance of powers of two or more given opponents. The objective of the strategic assessment exercise is to understand who is likely to win before strategy is formed.
Recruiting strategy and tactics can then be developed to shift the balance of factors in ones favor and thus assure victory. Alternatively one may decide that the opponent will prevail regardless of what one may do with the resources and position at hand.
In such a case, it may be better to outsource the effort to a third party with deeper resources and more expertise in conducting the desired campaign (in other words, employ mercenaries). In any case we are being introduced to the basis for understanding the principles of adaptation and impasse that will be an important consideration later in the treatise.
Application: This is like realizing that a competitor for talent has a local advantage for a particular kind of talent because they are close to a college or university that has a program that trains just the kind of people that both you and they need (an advantage of terrain.) Worse yet, because they are able to frequently visit the school at little cost, they hire the cream of the crop every year and you are required to accept the second or third round draft picks during the college-recruiting season.
You can turn this advantage of your adversary into a weakness by becoming the primary corporate sponsor of the target program through endowments to the school coupled with a lucrative internship program undertaken in conjunction with faculty members. You may even sponsor research to be undertaken by the faculty and their research assistants and hire them as consultants on special projects. You thereby assure their loyalty and reinforce your brand on campus with both faculty and students.
This tactical response naturally flows from your accurate strategic assessment of the enemy’s strategic superiority. You recognize that the advantage lies with your opponent. You accept your current disadvantage in terms of the recruiting terrain and consider how you can weaken the opponent by undermining her ability to secure the local resources she has come to depend upon. In other words, you apply the principle of adaptation to shift the balance of forces and factors in your favor and transform the impasse into an opportunity.
Nonetheless, for all your skill, you will fail in the long run if the leadership is unable to win the hearts and minds of the people. You may well succeed in meeting your staffing goals in terms of headcount but if senior management is not sincere in their regard for the wellbeing of the team you will not be able to retain the good people you recruit.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 10:03 am and is filed under The Art of War for Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Yup. And it’s worth remembering, I think, that relative strengths will, in practice, be asymmetrical — the competitor may be stronger in A, B, and C, but if the key factor in a given competition is (or can be made to be) D . . .
. . . to fast-forward from Sun Tzu to the Gates of Fire: it doesn’t matter if the enemy can bring 100,000 troops to bear, if the bottleneck is only twenty meters wide, and you can dominate it. Just don’t let them get around behind you, or, if they do, have a real good breakfast . . . :)