Chapter 11. The Art of War, Rebooted
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again” ― André Gide
In summer 2007, the CEO[1] of a UK software firm stepped onto a stage in Portland, Oregon (USA) to deliver a keynote address and promptly resigned. His keynote speech, about the future of the computing industry, started with a bit of history. Computing, he explained, had once been the bright, shiny “new thing” that everyone marvelled at. Then, because of supply and demand competition, it evolved, becoming a tool used first by ‘leading edge’ organisations and then a ‘product’ used by almost everyone else. This was the current state of the computing industry at that time. ‘What’ he asked ‘would come next — what was the future of the computing industry’?
Fig.21: Under pressure from supply and demand competition all things evolve (or die)
The answer, as seen in figure 21 above, was that computing would become a ‘utility service’ like electricity. Electricity had also once been a ‘thing of wonder’ that everyone marvelled at, before evolving into a utility service everyone could use by simply by plugging into it or switching it on when needed. Computing, argued the tech CEO, would eventually go the same way as electricity as it was subject to the same evolutionary pressure. Vendors, then making fortunes selling computing hardware, knew this. In a New York Times[2] article in 2003 IBM, the leading vendor of the time, admitted they were developing an “e-business on demand” technology that would “lead to computing power becoming a “utility”, like electricity or water, which can be turned off an on as if from a tap”. Yet the vendors saw this as a vision of the future, whereas our tech CEO standing on stage (and about to resign) was warning that this future had already arrived and that the vendors were ignoring this as were incentivised to. They had inertia[3] and would be too slow to respond.
Before going on stage to deliver this speech to an American audience this British CEO had received some bad news. The parent company of the subsidiary he ran had just told him that, they too, were going to ignore his warnings about the future of the computing industry and, instead of backing his vision to exploit the opportunities in these industry changes, they were going in a different direction. They had decided to take the advice of some very expensive management consultants who confidently informed them that the future would not be ‘computing-as-a-utility like service’ (ex, cloud) and platforms with masses of data that could be leveraged to build higher-order systems (like machine learning). No, the future would be 3D television and that’s where they were going to invest. The CEO — having glimpsed a very different future and about to announce the launch of some unorthodox moves to exploit this — had been gazumped. He resigned live on stage.
After a period ‘in the wilderness’ the now-former CEO joined an up-and-coming company called Ubuntu, then a minor player in the cloud operating systems industry with around 3% market share. But Ubuntu had a parent company who shared the same vision of the future for the industry as the former CEO. So, instead of investing time, capital and labour in ‘more of the same’ products they invested into this future instead. In just 18 months, (and with just half a million pounds of investment) they had captured 70% of a market previously dominated by giants like Microsoft and Red Hat. How had Ubuntu succeeded?
Rather than making better plans (the western approach to strategy) Ubuntu had developed superior situational awareness instead (the eastern approach to strategy). Their public success marked a personal milestone in the journey of the former CEO, Simon Wardley, who had gone from a (self-proclaimed) “bumbling and confused CEO” towards “having a vague idea” about what he was doing.[4] This journey had started the day he picked up a copy of the ‘Art of War’[5] and discovered Sun Tzu’s ‘Five Factors’. This had a profound effect on him because, at the time, he had been feeling lost in a sea of change and something of an imposter CEO. Tweaking the order of the factors and changing some of the language Wardley created a framework for himself — the ‘Strategy Cycle’:
Fig.22: Wardley’s Sun Tzu inspired ‘Strategy Cycle’
- Purpose this is your moral imperative, describing the scope of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. It’s the reason why others follow you
- Landscape this is a description of the environment you’re competing in. It shows the position of your assets and any obstacles in your way
- Climate describes the forces that are acting on your landscape, whether you want them to or not. These may be recurring economic patterns or competitors’ actions
- Doctrine this is your way of operating and the techniques you apply. Some of these appear to be universal as they work everywhere
- Leadership this is about the choices you make with regards to the “battle at hand”. These decisions are specific to each particular context (as no two landscapes are exactly the same).
To his horror Wardley noticed he’d been taking short-cuts. His company’s strategy (that he had written) was big on ‘Purpose’ (#1) but then jumped straight into ‘Leadership’ decisions (#5) of who must do what by when. There was no sophisticated understanding of the Landscape they were operating in, no understanding of how Climate might might change it and no concept of what Doctrine the organisation should be operating by. If a leader has to master all ‘Five Factors’ to bring victory Wardley was failing. Was he, he questioned, a fake CEO?
Getting desperate Wardley started to devour business books looking for answers. Yet everywhere he looked he found the same great leap: Business book after business book described an organisation’s Purpose — its more imperative — in great detail, but then jumped to the successful Leadership decisions made. There was nothing about how to understand the Landscape you’re competing in and nothing about how to understand Climate patterns changing it — it was all a ‘tyranny of tactics’ about who did what and when. The message everywhere seemed to be the same — if you want to be successful imitate what these successful leaders and organisations did. But what about all those organisations that did this and failed, where are the books about them? Doesn’t copying what someone else did, somewhere else, at some other time lead to different outcomes? No-one in business, it seemed, was even trying to master Sun Tzu’s ‘Five Factors’.
Wardley looked at whether other leaders in history — statesmen, generals, explorers — followed Sun Tzu’s Five Factors and what he found came as a shock. Almost every leader outside of business used maps to understand their Landscape: Generals identifying favourable terrain; ship captains plotting favourable courses; and explorers using maps to venture to the edge of known territories and making new maps to guide others who followed later. All seemed to also have some understanding of Climate patterns changing their Landscapes: How rivers frozen in winter can be traversed but become impassable in spring; or how trade winds enable ships to reach distant lands in certain seasons. And all seemed to have a concept of Doctrine, such as the ‘chain of command’ that enables frontline troops to react quickly to orders, but entire militaries to remain under the control of civilian leaders. No-one, it seemed, was relying on just Leadership decision-making alone.
Businesses today are often led by those fumbling in the dark, making decisions with little or no appreciation of the wider situation they’re in, how it’s changing or where their options for action are. And successes and failures (in the Clausewitzian tradition) are attributed to the presence or absence of ‘strategic genius’, which provides few learnable insights. This is the challenge Wardley took on: To provide a learnable way to become successful in business by rebooting Sun Tzu’s ‘Five Factors’. The method he developed — the one that helped Ubuntu steal the future from its rivals — is today known as Wardley Maps and is being used increasingly widely, from Amazon to Netflix, from Shopify to AirBnB, from large insurance companies and banks to governments and NGOs worldwide. Wardley Maps enable those wielding them to develop superior situational awareness — helping leaders look before they leap which, in times of uncertainty and change, are an invaluable weapon:
“…understanding your Landscape, the context that you’re competing in and having a modicum of situational awareness is not a luxury for strategy, it is at the very core of it. Inspiring vision statements, well trained forces, a strong culture and good technology will not save you if you fail to understand the Landscape, the position of forces and their size and capabilities”[6]
In this second book we’re going to explore how you can learn to see and understand the Landscape you’re in because, without a map, you’re rendered blind, guessing where your next move should be. But, with a map, you can go far — for ‘in the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’.
Fig.25: Simon Wardley showing some bloke at Microsoft his maps.
1 https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/27/wardley_zimki_fotango/ The article calls Wardley a COO whereas Wardley says he was CEO. I chose to accept Wardley’s definition of his role based on the idea that he probably knew it best.
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/technology/ibm-to-announce-push-on-grid-computing.html
3 Inertia is a detailed subject and will be explored fully in Books Three and Four.
4 Which he details in his book, starting here https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec).
5 Two copies actually as translations vary widely.
6 https://medium.com/wardleymaps/getting-started-yourself-e1a359b785a2
