STRATEGY, SCHMRATEGY...

I WAS browsing a bookshop the other day, and a new arrival caught my attention. The reason was perhaps less to do with the subject the book was dealing with and more with its timing. With the Champions League Twenty20 tournament around the corner, there lay a book (titled 'Not Just Cricket') released by the Deccan Chargers (2009 IPL Champs) that claimed to talk about the strategy of how losers (last team in the IPL standings in 2008) became winners. Ah, that word again - strategy. Business Schools have made it an artform to drill the drivel called strategic thinking into young mellable minds that can't seem to think for themselves and the epidemic is even more pronounced on the sporting field, regardless of whether you've been (or even
seen the inside of a even so much as a toilet of) in a B-School. Strategy remains a widely touted secret of (random?) success and stats like this one, that one third of all corporate strategies fail (according to a survey done recently by Forbes), are conveniently ignored.

Don't get me wrong here. I have great respect for the Deccan Chargers as a franchise and enjoyed their cricket at the IPL; it's just that I don't think a single swallow makes a summer or a singular piece of success makes for great 'strategy'. In IPL 2009, the Chargers started brightly enough (4 straight wins), but after that they hobbled to a record of 7-7 losing 7 of their last 10 matches (excluding the semis and final, of course). They even lost to the Rajasthan Royals and squeezed into the semis with Mumbai slipping up. With that much of variation, that too in a format that sometimes is akin to a lottery, there is much that can be attributed to chance, and the last I checked, chance and strategy weren't listed as synonyms in the dictionary. But it's not the team's fault. The marketing team obviously thinks selling a book at 700 bucks outlining some nonsensical sliver of a strategy and a few outdated interviews would be a great way to make a quick buck. Just like the current crop of comentators try to justify their raking in the moolah with trite observations and insights
so banal, you might as well have listening to them commentate on a video game. Whether it's Tony Greig ('The batsmen will look at the scoreboard and find out how many runs to get and how many balls to get them in; that's what they look at and try to work it out') who's lost his charm, or Ravi Shastri ('Collingwood loves to play the cut on the offside' - as opposed to the leg side, you mean, Ravi? Ever heard of a leg side cut?) who's lost his keen sense of observation, descriptions of strategy have been reduced to pointless observations which hardly had any meaningful impact on the big picture.

I am currently reading Michael Lewis's bestseller 'Moneyball' which describes how using advanced analytical techniques to find baseball players who are underpriced, Billy Beane, the GM of the Major League Baseball team Oakland Athletics turned his poor team (a payroll that's only about a fifth of the New York Yankees) into a successful franchise. Now, that's some serious strategic thinking, because Beane threw all conventional evaluation methods (scouts looking at a player and rating his ability to making it in the big leagues based on his 'good face' and running abilities, not his stats) out of his Athletics clubhouse window and put computer generated models, which crunched the relevant data, in charge. But that's not it. Beane had the gumption to stick to his guns and carry out his strategy for long enough before the results started to speak for themselves. That's how good strategy works - when it works, the results prove its superiority. And yes, the first year when the A's turned it around and won an astonishing 102 games out of 162, they didn't go ahead and publish a book about the success of their strategy. It was the sheer anomaly of the results and consistency that led an author like Lewis to hunt out the story.

Sun Tzu, whose 'Art of War' is widely quoted by the B-School types (whether they understand the context or not!) had written 'Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.' Coming up with post hoc strategies after some battles have been (unintendedly?) won is exactly what, to paraphrase Bon Jovi, gives the concept of strategy a bad name.