One day a clever hedgehog came to a wide river and was determined to cross it. Being a clever hedgehog he knew how to build bridges, so he set about building one over this river. Half-way done he stopped to admire his work. Looking back at the riverbank he saw…

In autumn 2020 I had a meeting with executives from a leading retailer. While waiting for them to arrive I studied their strategy which was, unusually, printed on three large sheets of paper and pinned to one of the walls of their conference room. Here laid out was the company’s…

The 2020s would have come as a nasty shock to anyone who thought the world was a predictable place. Yet, anyone who thought the world was predictable probably hadn’t been paying attention. In this short 21st century planes appearing ‘out of a clear blue sky’ sparked a series of wars…

Emerging or advancing economies, (of the kind I’ve spent most of my working life in) are no stranger to uncertainty, change or even collapse. Yet, as the short 21st century has shown us all, uncertainty, change and potential collapse is a “fundamental and irresolvable characteristic of [all] our lives⁠”[1]. It…

Pal’chinskii’s first principle was: Increase your chances of success by seeking out and experimenting with a variety of ideas. A few decades later W. Ross Ashby, a leading British scientist, echoed this principle in “An Introduction to Cybernetics”.[⁠1] Cybernetics is the science of communication and control in living and mechanical…

“A peak always conceals a treacherous valley” — Shigetaka Komori. Former chairman and CEO, Fujifilm⁠[1] Business schools love case studies because they have the power to convey a complete story succinctly — from incident to result — and convey critical points the author wishes to get across. Yet case studies…

Success stories from the East don’t appear to be popular in the West. The West seems to be reluctant to learn from the East — as seen in the CoVid pandemic, where the more successful strategies of Asian nations were largely ignored by Western leaders⁠[1]. Maybe this is due to…

What lessons can we learn from the Eastern approach to strategy when dealing with, for example, the kind of competitive threat Honda posed to Britain’s champions in the US motorcycle industry? Perhaps fortunately we have a case showing exactly what Honda did, a decade later, when their leading position was…

At the time of writing Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is number 4 on Amazon’s ‘Strategy & Competition’[⁠1] bestseller list. …

The long arc of Western supremacy made the Western model the one that nations striving to modernise would emulate. Yet a series of crises in this young 21st century have, understandably, led many to question the pre-eminence of all things Western. The poor outcomes in many Western nations during the…

The problem is not ‘people playing checkers when others are playing chess’. The problem is that we’re playing chess while others are playing weiqi. Uncertainty is central to both the Eastern and Western approaches to strategy. The Chinese philosophical tradition – from which Sun Tzu emerged – recognised that, as…

“Instead of using multiple different ways of explaining the same thing between different functions of the company then try to use one: A map.” — Simon Wardley⁠ As we explored in Book One,⁠ the modern business world shares some similarities with warfare — competition with rivals and uncertainty (as we…