Nehaveigur

No plan survives first contact with the enemy

Helmuth von Moltke

The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything

Dwight Eisenhower

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s possible to will greatness into existence.  On the contrary, to a first approximation none of the grand strategies that I have seen organizations announce (some of them with my input) led to anything recognizable as greatness.

Yet, greatness in business, in politics and science does arise and does exist. Often, greatness causes greatness in a positive feedback loop, but nobody understands the ultimate cause. Greatness may be an emergent phenomenon that can’t be planned.

I believe this is true for bringing up children. As a parent, there’s not much, and there may be nothing, that you can do to make them achieve greatness in life. On the other hand, there are things you can do to mess things up for them, but those are mostly big and obvious. Serious physical and emotional abuse are two examples. There are arguments to the contrary, but I’m not convinced.

In Why America Is Not A New Rome, Vaclav Smil compares the US and Rome and concludes that they didn’t have much in common. However, he concedes that there was one negative they shared: The absence of a grand strategy.

I join those who argue that the Romans had no grand imperial strategy, unless exploiting opportunities or reacting to new circumstances could be seen as having one, and that most great powers have always followed a similar course of action […] a critical reading of modern American history shows foreign policies were overwhelmingly reactive rather than deliberately transformative.

If it’s true that neither great states nor great businesses got there by following any long-term strategies, then what is the point of formulating those strategies?

My intuition is that a good strategy is one that avoids doing harm. No cultural revolutions, great leaps forward or one-child policies. Second, while it’s not possible to plan for greatness, it’s possible to prepare for it. Third, none of this invalidates strategies that aim to marginally improve things steps by step. A great strategy may be one that recognizes that all three aims complement each other.