Oh, I thought I already anticipated these points in my post. In some extremely narrow sense, sure, Schwarzkopf achieved his handed-down objective and was celebrated as a hero and probably even died without a guilty conscience. I think a strategy book is bad if it only defines how to blitz through your own objectives without any greater sense of ‘am I helping my cause?’. Even if you value Iraqi lives at 0, he cost his country trillions of dollars, led to 35 years and counting of civil conflict and destabilization in the region, and got thousands of his military colleagues killed.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that a framework for better strategies should implore its readers to consider a strategy in its own context, and to factor in the effects of your strategy on your broader cause (whether team, country, organisation, what-have-you). Perhaps this does not make the strategies more or less likely to achieve their objectives in the narrowest sense, but it does help move your cause & vision for the world forward.
(Ex. I have seen companies achieve near-term objectives at the cost of reputation and trust, which invariably makes it harder to achieve other objectives in the long-term; this is such an externality which the book should be considering)
Oh, I thought I already anticipated these points in my post. In some extremely narrow sense, sure, Schwarzkopf achieved his handed-down objective and was celebrated as a hero and probably even died without a guilty conscience. I think a strategy book is bad if it only defines how to blitz through your own objectives without any greater sense of ‘am I helping my cause?’. Even if you value Iraqi lives at 0, he cost his country trillions of dollars, led to 35 years and counting of civil conflict and destabilization in the region, and got thousands of his military colleagues killed.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that a framework for better strategies should implore its readers to consider a strategy in its own context, and to factor in the effects of your strategy on your broader cause (whether team, country, organisation, what-have-you). Perhaps this does not make the strategies more or less likely to achieve their objectives in the narrowest sense, but it does help move your cause & vision for the world forward.
(Ex. I have seen companies achieve near-term objectives at the cost of reputation and trust, which invariably makes it harder to achieve other objectives in the long-term; this is such an externality which the book should be considering)