Can we stop comparing business to war?
In war, you destroy the enemy, and pay in blood and gold. It's a matter of life and death, and the strategic objectives are black and white.
Business is not really like this. First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA. Next, there is rarely a singularity of purpose around a strategy and viable, co-operative alternatives are possible. Next, crushing all your competition would lead to an un-beneficial monopoly, so it's not really a worthwhile fight. Finally, war, and specifically combat are high stress and traumatic experiences that are not sustainable for more than a few months at a time. Humans can act in this way, and maybe the CEO is in this pure fight/ flight/freeze/posture mode, but it's not great to lead a major company there.
That said, there is a lot we can learn from the military, but this "business as war" analogy is pretty absurd. Does it mean the workers are mercenaries? If a worker leaves the company, are they a traitor? Maybe I'm reading too far into it, but let's leave war to the military!
>Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, [...]
No, we can't because talking about any topic with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human linguistics.
In games like football, we talk about the the quarterback being the "field general" and the offensive tackles and defensive tackles "battling in the trenches".
When husbands & wives argue or fight in divorce cases, we talk about them "drawing their battle lines".
Historians or politicians often talk of "class warfare" or "war on poverty". The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is another borrowing of words from war.
Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".
Wikipedia's most controversial articles have "edit wars" which results in pages getting locked.
In computer science, we have the "Byzantine Generals Problem" which is war metaphor.
If you want to jump into every thread <topic X> to plead with people to "stop comparing X to war", you're not going to get anywhere. (E.g. "can we please stop comparing distributed computing fault detection to Byzantium generals and war?")
Even the linguistics field which studied our propensity to always compare topics to "war" also went meta on itself with "linguistic wars": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars
I think war may be more similar to business than you think it is. And it may not be very much like the war you imagine in your head.
You think there is singularity of purpose in war? Every general, every battalion, every captain, every soldier has their own interests at play. It's a miracle of leadership that those can be put aside long enough to fight side by side.
Crushing the competition sounds like the right move in war. But then why have so many armies failed to subdue and control the local populace? Could it be that treating the conquered with respect, as partners, as humans, might be more effective than sheer domination?
And how sustainable is war? It depends. In WW1, soldiers at the front lines for more than a few days often suffered shell shock from the severe tension, nonstop terror, and unbelievable pounding that must have felt like it came from the bowels of the Earth. In other wars, there is no traditional front line, and soldiers are deployed for months or years. And they're not in 100% fight mode the entire time either.
War and business are not the same. But they may be closer than you think.
I don't think that anything even remotely that decisive has been the case for many years now. From what I see, war these days is a lot more about attempting to establish a strong enough position to deter competetion for a sufficient duration to achieve economic/political ends.
> It's a matter of life and death, and the strategic objectives are black and white.
To my mind, that is the whole point of the wartime analogy. It _is_ life and death (for your company) when you are at war.
Sometimes you need shocking analogies to get the message across to employees; if you have weeks of money left in the bank, you need everyone to be ruthlessly focused on the strategy that has been decided. No time for picking daisies or fixing tech debt when you have weeks of money left! This shocking analogy aims to provides focus and clarity when it's most needed.
> When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company was weeks away from bankruptcy—a classic wartime scenario. He needed everyone to move with precision and follow his exact plan; there was no room for individual creativity outside of the core mission. In stark contrast, as Google achieved dominance in the search market, Google’s management fostered peacetime innovation by enabling and even requiring every employee to spend 20% of their time on their own new projects.
I completely agree that the comparisons to war are way overdone. However if this is your perception of war, then there is a lot that isn't really accurate.
1. If everyone doesn't go home it's a crisis, it's NEVER ok
2. We work unbelievably hard to try and find "viable, co-operative alternatives" and, at least in modern warfare, there is almost never a singularity of purpose
3. "Crushing" your competition hasn't worked since WWII - even then we worked to rebuild afterwards. Building Partnerships is a key tenet of modern warfare
4. On the ground negotiations are a daily/standard practice in the shit even if they aren't formal diplomatic negotiations
5. Low-Intensity war has been the standard for over a decade now too...and being in a warzone for a year at a time is not uncommon
So there's things to be learned on either side and it's worth really understanding both to have a full picture.
>Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, you destroy the enemy, and pay in blood and gold. It's a matter of life and death, and the strategic objectives are black and white.
War is just a continuation of politics, and politics are neither black nor white. Neither strategic objectives are black and white - due to fog of war and imperfect intelligence.
>Business is not really like this.
It kinda can be, if you drive out competition, attaining a virtual monopoly(you keep one competing company on life support while you reap all the benefits, without having all the disadvantages of being a literal monopoly) on your speciality you are literally destroying a livelihood of all people employed by your competition.
>First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA.
if your employees are desperate enough, they will comply, especially in countries with lack of social safety net.
Is it horrible? absolutely yes, and we should do everything from system perspective to prevent it.
I agree with you on principle, but the "wartime/peacetime" vocabulary comes from "The Godfather" - a movie not about war, but the Mafia which I think is a little more useful to compare to business.
Another reason to stop is that most people in America at least simply don't understand war or the military very well. Since the end of the draft in the 1970s only a small percentage of the population has sufficient experience to talk about it sensibly.
I like baseball or football analogies much better. People who use them are a lot more likely to know what they are talking about.
If you can't earn your money by winning against competitors, you will be left to starve and die. No blood, no trauma, but the end result is not too different.
I think Schmidt was the real wartime CEO here, when the war could have extinguished Google. e,g. Microsoft changing the default search engine on IE when it had > 80% share could have hurt google a lot more than Facebook or social ever could. Chrome was probably Google's "Manhattan Project" in that regard.
By contrast, when Larry came to power, Google was more like the USA today. Rich, with very good resources, and playing the role of world superpower.
But at the time search wasn't really Microsoft's wheelhouse. That became immediately apparent to everyone who then immediately made the deliberate switch to Google. Essentially giftwrapping public trust in Microsoft and handing it to Google. Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot was the best thing for Google at that time.
Microsoft was prioritizing an unscalable revenue stream: advertising. Google was expanding the search market, and later came back for the advertising and browser markets once it had resources. Up until about the Google plus days Google never engaged in an endeavor with serious competition.
I agree. Eric Schmidt was the real war time CEO. But let's not forget that he worked for failed war time CEO's against the same enemy (Novell and Sun when they fought with Microsoft).
This was published in 2011, and refers to Larry Page and Google+. It turns out that Google would have been better off if they had been less single-minded about pushing their new product. So take it all with a grain of salt.
Beyond that, has anyone else noticed how executive types LOVE to quote movies like the god father, wolf of wall street, and similar types of media, as if they themselves are the protagonist and/or "hero" of the story? Its a "Rah-rah" strongman ideal chalk full of projection and other bullshit mechanisms.
To quote M.A.S.H. " War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse." What is business? Cupcakes.
I also think this article has the wrong take; Eric Schmidt was always training wheels for Larry to learn how to run a multi-billion dollar company. I don't think he trusted himself and he honestly seems like a pretty risk-averse guy. Realistically he hasn't been a "Wartime CEO" at all; Google has made a lot of money by making a lot of safe choices. But there are lots of safe choices to be made when you've built a moat as big as they have.
Agreed, not sure how well this has aged for a variety of reasons. If you really follow these things during "war times" most SaaS companies will attrit their core competent staff and be left with no army. Not a winning move.
I think a lot of CEOs don’t recognize when the war is over. What worked for a while may not work forever.
Stack ranking is a classical example. Firing the bottom 10% once or twice may actually be a good thing. But then you have to realize that this was a one off and you should stop or things get weird. Same with crunch time projects. My company recently has had a few high urgency projects with a lot of overtime and stress. Instead of calming down things it seems management has got addicted to permanent panic and not surprisingly people are burning out.
As a serial startup engineer, I've only been in wartime situations since leaving my last big-co job 12 years ago.
I agree with the large paintbrush aim of the article. Singular focus and knowing how to load your gun and fire those 1-3 shots you've got. You don't get 6, or 18 - that's peacetime. You have lots of data, customer feedback etc to show you how to point those few those shots, but that's all you've really got.
The one sentiment I didn't fully agree with was:
> Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.
This makes it feel like during war time the CEO doesn't have control of the culture, which counter to the entire post, is exactly what the CEO has control of. It's just that the culture is different in peace vs war, just like the CEOs are. Arguably the whole company is different all the way to an individual person level.
To speak to the other threads, I don't think the co-founders of Google were ever good peace or wartime CEOs. I think they rightfully gave up that seat multiple times because it's just not them. And to be explicit, there's nothing wrong with that.
"Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone."
"Peacetime CEO strives for broad based buy in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements."
Oh good just what we need. More permission to be a jerk at work to try and communicate urgency. This is one of those things where a smart accomplished person says a thing and we're supposed to listen but even in 9 years this behavior is outmoded. If we framed all of this up as ruthless prioritization and clear understanding of urgency, then that tells you what you need to know. Figure out what works for you in a way that doesn't violate your teams' principles and values.
Disagreements affect morale and slow down execution time, and consensus-building dilutes ownership which also affects morale and in the mid-term also slows down decision making.
You can deactivate consensus-building and encourage disagree and commit without being a jerk. It's one of the though ones when you are leading, but it can be pulled off. Of course you need to collectively make the judgement that you want to give ownership to tight groups and that people will need to sense if they need to disagree and commit, otherwise you will sound delusional and get out of touch with the rest of the team.
A good CEO seems to be able to separate the theories that bring value. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs with Jim Collins for example. Maybe management science is still in its early days.
I'm indifferent towards the content of this article, but a meta-point: it is interesting how our civilian society has militarized so thoroughly. There are the obvious things like the militarization of the police forces, but it has trickled down to seemingly frivolous things like "Cupcake Wars" and "Cutthroat Kitchen".
It might be because members of developed societies are so unlikely to come into contact with actual war that they can call even the most minor conflicts a war. Lack of stimulus accentuates what little you can get.
Totally agree. I think to some degree it started with the first Iraq war when the first GPS bombs made war look like a cool video game. I think it’s a very bad trend that eventually will lower the threshold to real war. Same for torture. Movies have made torture look cool and useful.
Odd. I've always interpreted these tropes as caricatures of people who act _as if_ they're at war or at peace, not as binary exemplars. The world's a lot more complex than war/peace, surely?
Even if you take the analogy literally, the distinction between peacetime and wartime has itself blurred as a result of nonlinear warfare and "forever" wars. I think it's clear that Ben Horowitz has not been an operator in far too long and anyone who takes this advice seriously deserves the failure that's coming to them. If we're going to match thinkpiece VCs against other thinkpiece VCs, Peter Thiel is probably much more sanguine and closer to reality than he is.
Thiel argues that the opposite of the competition emerges (which is a monopoly), and that these monopolies tend to operate much more ruthlessly and efficiently in the present day and are much harder, if not impossible, to dismantle. I disagree with him on whether that's a good thing or not, but I think his understanding of corporate mechanisms is much closer to reality than Ben Horowitz. The truth is that war theater is expensive -- too expensive these days for anyone to afford. Those characteristics of the "wartime CEO" he demonstrates (as well as some of the "Peacetime CEO") -- besides more focus on the present than the future, how many of them truly are proactively solving the crisis rather than reactively panicking?
For any sufficiently large organisation, they will have parts of the business that are in "wartime" and parts that are in "peacetime".
The great CEO is able to manage their organisation to handle both. But odd are, you won't see this. Because they know to do that effectively, their "all hands" messaging has to be bland, tending towards peacetime messaging - or risk spooking the peacetime parts of the business. But then when talking to the wartime parts of the business, typically much smaller audiences, they are aggressive, and encourage the single minded focus of the leader of that part of the business.
Simon Wardley has many many good articles on this topic, often with the military angle - because war is the ultimate expression of conflict, and business are always in conflict with something.
Just fyi, this is not an article about being a CEO during an actual war, to anyone in the audience scrolling through the comments trying to figure that out. It's just about being a CEO when the competition is far behind, versus being a CEO when the competition is very close.
Some companies (e.g. Netflix) seem to operate as if there's always a war going on.
Its probably good for a lot of companies to adopt a wartime mentality every once in a while.
The day it became obvious that streaming was the future, Netflix was immediately at war, because at some point, in a streaming world, there is no reason not for d2c streaming, and Netflix owned zero content.
I think it needs to be a deliberate choice with an understanding of upsides and downsides of the approach. As far as I know Netflix knows what they are doing. Other companies often don’t.
[+] [-] wespiser_2018|6 years ago|reply
Business is not really like this. First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA. Next, there is rarely a singularity of purpose around a strategy and viable, co-operative alternatives are possible. Next, crushing all your competition would lead to an un-beneficial monopoly, so it's not really a worthwhile fight. Finally, war, and specifically combat are high stress and traumatic experiences that are not sustainable for more than a few months at a time. Humans can act in this way, and maybe the CEO is in this pure fight/ flight/freeze/posture mode, but it's not great to lead a major company there.
That said, there is a lot we can learn from the military, but this "business as war" analogy is pretty absurd. Does it mean the workers are mercenaries? If a worker leaves the company, are they a traitor? Maybe I'm reading too far into it, but let's leave war to the military!
[+] [-] jasode|6 years ago|reply
No, we can't because talking about any topic with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human linguistics.
In games like football, we talk about the the quarterback being the "field general" and the offensive tackles and defensive tackles "battling in the trenches".
When husbands & wives argue or fight in divorce cases, we talk about them "drawing their battle lines".
Historians or politicians often talk of "class warfare" or "war on poverty". The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is another borrowing of words from war.
Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".
Wikipedia's most controversial articles have "edit wars" which results in pages getting locked.
In computer science, we have the "Byzantine Generals Problem" which is war metaphor.
If you want to jump into every thread <topic X> to plead with people to "stop comparing X to war", you're not going to get anywhere. (E.g. "can we please stop comparing distributed computing fault detection to Byzantium generals and war?")
Even the linguistics field which studied our propensity to always compare topics to "war" also went meta on itself with "linguistic wars": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars
[+] [-] darkerside|6 years ago|reply
You think there is singularity of purpose in war? Every general, every battalion, every captain, every soldier has their own interests at play. It's a miracle of leadership that those can be put aside long enough to fight side by side.
Crushing the competition sounds like the right move in war. But then why have so many armies failed to subdue and control the local populace? Could it be that treating the conquered with respect, as partners, as humans, might be more effective than sheer domination?
And how sustainable is war? It depends. In WW1, soldiers at the front lines for more than a few days often suffered shell shock from the severe tension, nonstop terror, and unbelievable pounding that must have felt like it came from the bowels of the Earth. In other wars, there is no traditional front line, and soldiers are deployed for months or years. And they're not in 100% fight mode the entire time either.
War and business are not the same. But they may be closer than you think.
[+] [-] falcor84|6 years ago|reply
I don't think that anything even remotely that decisive has been the case for many years now. From what I see, war these days is a lot more about attempting to establish a strong enough position to deter competetion for a sufficient duration to achieve economic/political ends.
[+] [-] theptip|6 years ago|reply
To my mind, that is the whole point of the wartime analogy. It _is_ life and death (for your company) when you are at war.
Sometimes you need shocking analogies to get the message across to employees; if you have weeks of money left in the bank, you need everyone to be ruthlessly focused on the strategy that has been decided. No time for picking daisies or fixing tech debt when you have weeks of money left! This shocking analogy aims to provides focus and clarity when it's most needed.
> When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company was weeks away from bankruptcy—a classic wartime scenario. He needed everyone to move with precision and follow his exact plan; there was no room for individual creativity outside of the core mission. In stark contrast, as Google achieved dominance in the search market, Google’s management fostered peacetime innovation by enabling and even requiring every employee to spend 20% of their time on their own new projects.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|6 years ago|reply
1. If everyone doesn't go home it's a crisis, it's NEVER ok
2. We work unbelievably hard to try and find "viable, co-operative alternatives" and, at least in modern warfare, there is almost never a singularity of purpose
3. "Crushing" your competition hasn't worked since WWII - even then we worked to rebuild afterwards. Building Partnerships is a key tenet of modern warfare
4. On the ground negotiations are a daily/standard practice in the shit even if they aren't formal diplomatic negotiations
5. Low-Intensity war has been the standard for over a decade now too...and being in a warzone for a year at a time is not uncommon
So there's things to be learned on either side and it's worth really understanding both to have a full picture.
[+] [-] Xelbair|6 years ago|reply
War is just a continuation of politics, and politics are neither black nor white. Neither strategic objectives are black and white - due to fog of war and imperfect intelligence.
>Business is not really like this.
It kinda can be, if you drive out competition, attaining a virtual monopoly(you keep one competing company on life support while you reap all the benefits, without having all the disadvantages of being a literal monopoly) on your speciality you are literally destroying a livelihood of all people employed by your competition.
>First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA.
if your employees are desperate enough, they will comply, especially in countries with lack of social safety net.
Is it horrible? absolutely yes, and we should do everything from system perspective to prevent it.
[+] [-] dccoolgai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alaskamiller|6 years ago|reply
I run businesses now.
Business is war.
War is business.
[+] [-] hodgesrm|6 years ago|reply
I like baseball or football analogies much better. People who use them are a lot more likely to know what they are talking about.
[+] [-] cafard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thkim|6 years ago|reply
If you can't earn your money by winning against competitors, you will be left to starve and die. No blood, no trauma, but the end result is not too different.
[+] [-] enitihas|6 years ago|reply
By contrast, when Larry came to power, Google was more like the USA today. Rich, with very good resources, and playing the role of world superpower.
[+] [-] zelon88|6 years ago|reply
Microsoft was prioritizing an unscalable revenue stream: advertising. Google was expanding the search market, and later came back for the advertising and browser markets once it had resources. Up until about the Google plus days Google never engaged in an endeavor with serious competition.
[+] [-] kumarm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmpz22|6 years ago|reply
To quote M.A.S.H. " War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse." What is business? Cupcakes.
[+] [-] wayoutthere|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kfarr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
Stack ranking is a classical example. Firing the bottom 10% once or twice may actually be a good thing. But then you have to realize that this was a one off and you should stop or things get weird. Same with crunch time projects. My company recently has had a few high urgency projects with a lot of overtime and stress. Instead of calming down things it seems management has got addicted to permanent panic and not surprisingly people are burning out.
[+] [-] ska|6 years ago|reply
This is a classic red flag. One of the few easily visible from the trenches, too.
[+] [-] enitihas|6 years ago|reply
Even Churchil, considered a hero in Britain after WWII, lost the next election badly to Atlee, as people were looking for a peacetime leader.
The good thing is Atlee setup the NHS. So I guess peacetime leaders are important after war.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gnrlst|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irjustin|6 years ago|reply
I agree with the large paintbrush aim of the article. Singular focus and knowing how to load your gun and fire those 1-3 shots you've got. You don't get 6, or 18 - that's peacetime. You have lots of data, customer feedback etc to show you how to point those few those shots, but that's all you've really got.
The one sentiment I didn't fully agree with was:
> Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.
This makes it feel like during war time the CEO doesn't have control of the culture, which counter to the entire post, is exactly what the CEO has control of. It's just that the culture is different in peace vs war, just like the CEOs are. Arguably the whole company is different all the way to an individual person level.
To speak to the other threads, I don't think the co-founders of Google were ever good peace or wartime CEOs. I think they rightfully gave up that seat multiple times because it's just not them. And to be explicit, there's nothing wrong with that.
[+] [-] thinkingkong|6 years ago|reply
"Peacetime CEO strives for broad based buy in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements."
Oh good just what we need. More permission to be a jerk at work to try and communicate urgency. This is one of those things where a smart accomplished person says a thing and we're supposed to listen but even in 9 years this behavior is outmoded. If we framed all of this up as ruthless prioritization and clear understanding of urgency, then that tells you what you need to know. Figure out what works for you in a way that doesn't violate your teams' principles and values.
[+] [-] mathattack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvarangot|6 years ago|reply
You can deactivate consensus-building and encourage disagree and commit without being a jerk. It's one of the though ones when you are leading, but it can be pulled off. Of course you need to collectively make the judgement that you want to give ownership to tight groups and that people will need to sense if they need to disagree and commit, otherwise you will sound delusional and get out of touch with the rest of the team.
[+] [-] the_gipsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_a_g|6 years ago|reply
Such a good point. Most of the famous management books fall into this category.
[+] [-] lowdose|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vearwhershuh|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if this is organic or not.
[+] [-] magicsmoke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinjp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] late2part|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yowlingcat|6 years ago|reply
Thiel argues that the opposite of the competition emerges (which is a monopoly), and that these monopolies tend to operate much more ruthlessly and efficiently in the present day and are much harder, if not impossible, to dismantle. I disagree with him on whether that's a good thing or not, but I think his understanding of corporate mechanisms is much closer to reality than Ben Horowitz. The truth is that war theater is expensive -- too expensive these days for anyone to afford. Those characteristics of the "wartime CEO" he demonstrates (as well as some of the "Peacetime CEO") -- besides more focus on the present than the future, how many of them truly are proactively solving the crisis rather than reactively panicking?
[+] [-] Swannie|6 years ago|reply
The great CEO is able to manage their organisation to handle both. But odd are, you won't see this. Because they know to do that effectively, their "all hands" messaging has to be bland, tending towards peacetime messaging - or risk spooking the peacetime parts of the business. But then when talking to the wartime parts of the business, typically much smaller audiences, they are aggressive, and encourage the single minded focus of the leader of that part of the business.
Simon Wardley has many many good articles on this topic, often with the military angle - because war is the ultimate expression of conflict, and business are always in conflict with something.
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godzilla82|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] magwa101|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply