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Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London, is regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on war and international politics. He has written extensively on these topics. His most recent book, Strategy: A History, provides a definitive account of the development of strategy, not only in the military sphere but also in business, politics, and beyond. 劳伦斯·傅利曼爵士是伦敦大学国王学院(King’s College London)战争研究教授，被视为战争和国际政治领域的世界顶尖权威之一。他就这些主题写了大量的文章。他的最新著作《战略: 历史》(Strategy: a History)对战略的发展进行了权威性的描述，不仅在军事领域，而且在商业、政治等领域。 Sir Lawrence recently spoke with Martin Reeves, a senior partner and managing director in the New York office of The Boston Consulting Group and leader of The Strategy Institute, BCG’s vehicle to detect, capture, and develop ideas from within and beyond business that have the potential to impact how companies think about strategy and competitive advantage. Edited excerpts of the discussion follow. 劳伦斯爵士最近采访了波士顿咨询集团(BCG)纽约办公室的高级合伙人兼董事总经理马丁·里夫斯(Martin Reeves)。里夫斯是波士顿咨询集团战略研究所(The Strategy Institute)的负责人，该研究所负责发现、捕捉和开发来自企业内外的创意，这些创意有可能影响企业对战略和竞争优势的看法。以下是经过编辑的讨论节选。 We’re joined today by Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London. Sir Lawrence, thank you very much for joining us today to discuss the evolution of strategy. Some people have questioned the relevance of business strategy, given the turbulent and unpredictable world we live in. In the military sphere, is strategy still relevant? 今天加入我们的是劳伦斯·傅利曼爵士伦敦国王学院的战争研究教授。劳伦斯爵士，非常感谢你今天参加我们的讨论战略的演变。鉴于我们生活在一个动荡和不可预测的世界，一些人质疑商业战略的相关性。在军事领域，战略仍然重要吗？ In the military, strategy is very important. What you’ll find, actually—certainly in Britain—is that the military have been complaining that there isn’t enough strategy and that their political masters don’t think sufficiently far ahead and aren’t clear enough about what they are trying to achieve. Now I think that, sometimes, the military have an unrealistic expectation of what strategy can do for them, since the whole experience of warfare is that as soon as you get into a campaign, the circumstances turn out to be quite different from those that you were anticipating: the enemy does things you weren’t expecting. But strategy development is a way of thinking. It’s a way of starting to plan a campaign to work out what you’re trying to do and how you might achieve it. 在军事上，战略非常重要。实际上，你会发现——当然是在英国——军方一直在抱怨没有足够的战略，他们的政治领导人没有充分考虑远景，也不够清楚自己想要达到什么目标。现在我认为，有时候，军方对于战略能为他们带来什么有着不切实际的期望，因为战争的全部经验就是，一旦你进入一场战役，情况就会变得与你预期的完全不同: 敌人会做出你意想不到的事情。但战略发展是一种思维方式。这是一种开始计划一个活动的方法，来弄清楚你正在尝试做什么，以及如何实现它。 If the unpredictability of warfare or business means that the plan will not survive the first contact with reality, in what sense is a plan relevant? 如果战争或商业的不可预测性意味着计划在第一次与现实接触后将无法存活，那么计划在何种意义上是相关的？ Eisenhower once said that plans are useless but planning is essential. The process of thinking through and of working out possibilities enables you to cope with situations as they arise and to recognize that things are different. But if you stick rigidly to a plan, you’ll get into trouble because, inevitably, things will turn. So my approach to strategy has been not to see it as something that’s governed by objectives but rather as something that is governed by the starting problem—by the here and now. 艾森豪威尔曾经说过，计划是无用的，但计划是必不可少的。思考和找出可能性的过程使你能够在情况出现时处理它们，并认识到事情是不同的。但是如果你严格执行一个计划，你就会陷入麻烦，因为事情不可避免地会发生变化。因此，我对战略的看法是，不要把它看作是由目标所支配的东西，而是由起点问题所支配的东西ーー由此时此地所支配。 One narrative of business and military strategy is that the world is a lot more unpredictable today and that we need, therefore, a different type of strategy. Another plausible view is that this has always been the case. What is your view on whether strategy has, in fact, evolved and how it has evolved? 关于商业和军事战略的一种说法是，当今世界变得更加不可预测，因此我们需要一种不同类型的战略。另一种看似合理的观点是，情况一直都是这样。你对战略是否已经演变以及如何演变的看法是什么？ I think the whole point about the early attempts at strategic thinking was that it was about control: How is it that, by out-thinking your opponent, you can control the environment into which you’re moving? And this assumed that you have some very basic core strength to start with that you could deploy. We don’t have that same sense of control anymore. It’s much more responsive, much more fluid, much more adaptive. 我认为，早期战略思考的全部意义在于控制: 通过比对手更好地思考，你怎么能够控制你要进入的环境？这假设你有一些非常基本的核心力量，你可以开始部署。我们不再有同样的控制感。它更灵敏，更流畅，更具适应性。 Military strategy is, of course, a much older discipline than business strategy, which is still comparatively young. Does business strategy still have a lot to learn from military strategy, vice versa, or both? 当然，军事战略是一门比商业战略古老得多的学科，而商业战略仍然相对年轻。商业战略是否仍然可以从军事战略中学到很多东西，反之亦然，还是两者兼而有之？ I think business and military strategy need to pay attention to each other. Business strategy probably pays more attention to military strategy. But they’re from a very sort of old-fashioned view of what it’s about. They go back to Clausewitz, and it’s about whether you should mount a frontal assault or not, or how you hold territory. A lot of military strategy—because of the sort of campaigns that have been fought over recent times, especially since the end of the Cold War—has become much more varied and fluid and has raised a lot of the issues that a business strategist would recognize, such as telling a narrative or telling a story: How do you persuade people rather than just beat them up? So I think there is a lot to learn. But there isn’t, at the moment, I would say, a great deal of dialogue between the two approaches. 我认为商业和军事战略需要相互关注。企业战略可能更注重军事战略。但是他们是从一种非常老式的观点来看待这件事的。他们回到克劳塞维茨，这是关于你是否应该发动正面攻击，或者你如何控制领土。很多军事战略ーー由于近年来的战役，尤其是冷战结束以来的战役ーー已经变得更加多样化和灵活，并且提出了很多商业战略家能够认识到的问题，比如讲故事或讲故事: 你如何说服人们，而不只是痛打他们？所以我认为还有很多东西需要学习。但是，我想说，目前在这两种方法之间还没有很多的对话。 We use the same word—strategy—in both disciplines, military and business. But are these actually fundamentally different problems or are they essentially the same? 我们在军事和商业两个领域都使用同一个词ーー战略。但是，这些问题实际上是根本不同的，还是本质上是相同的？ There’s a generic approach that I think can be followed. But when you’ve said that, obviously, military strategy involves violence. And that colors everything because it raises exceptional ethical, legal, and political problems that shape the way it develops. Business strategy has its own ethical, legal, and political problems. But they’re quite different. It’s about making money; it’s about sustaining an organization. It may not have always the sense of conflict that’s at the heart of military strategy. But that doesn’t mean that some basic themes and ideas can’t work across. 我认为有一个通用的方法可以遵循。但是当你说到这一点时，很明显，军事战略涉及到暴力。因为它提出了特殊的道德、法律和政治问题，这些问题塑造了它的发展方式。企业战略有其自身的伦理、法律和政治问题。但是他们很不一样。这是关于赚钱，关于维持一个组织。它可能并不总是有冲突感，而冲突感是军事战略的核心。但这并不意味着一些基本的主题和想法不能跨越。 What do you think are some of the most interesting problems in strategy today that you think we can learn from? 你认为当今战略中最有趣的问题是什么? 你认为我们可以从中学到什么？ The way that we approach problems is affected by basically the social and economic structures of which we’re a part. The digital age—and the resulting ease of communication—has made a lot of difference. It means it’s possible to gather information in ways that would not have been possible before and to interpret and analyze that information in new ways. But it also means that you’re able to put out your ideas, not necessarily as a form of information but rather as a narrative of some sort—as a story of some sort—to make an impact. 我们处理问题的方式基本上受到我们所属的社会和经济结构的影响。数字时代ーー以及由此带来的沟通便利ーー带来了很大的不同。这意味着可以用以前不可能的方式收集信息，并用新的方式解释和分析这些信息。但这也意味着你可以把自己的想法发表出来，不一定是以信息的形式，而是以某种形式的叙述ーー以某种形式的故事ーー来产生影响。 How all that works, people are still working through, I think. The challenge at the moment, I think—which you can see in business, politics, and the military—is to find ways of adapting to the new possibilities opened up by the digital age but also to be aware that there are new dangers there, too: that it can be overwhelming, that your messages can get lost, but also that you’ll be found out. One of the most important features of military strategy is that you get found out very quickly if you’ve got it all wrong. Business strategy can sometimes take longer, but in the end, you’ll be found out. The digital age possibly means you’re going to be found out more quickly. 我认为，人们仍然在努力解决这些问题。我认为，目前的挑战ーー你可以在商业、政治和军事领域看到这一点ーー是找到适应数字时代带来的新可能性的方法，但同时也要意识到其中也存在新的危险: 它可能是压倒性的，你的信息可能会丢失，但你也会被发现。军事战略最重要的特征之一是，如果你搞错了，很快就会被发现。商业策略有时可能需要更长的时间，但最终，你会被发现。数字时代可能意味着你很快就会被发现。 Whether in business or the military sphere, where do you think the next big advances in strategy will come from? 无论是在商业领域还是军事领域，你认为下一个战略上的重大进步将来自哪里？ You can see two big areas. The first is the systems that are now being developed for drawing upon, collating, and interpreting different sources of information, including information about what other people are thinking. The second, which is quite different, is recognition that strategy is an art. There’s a scientific basis to it, but in the end, it’s an art. We’ve learned an awful lot from developments in cognitive psychology about how people think, about what they respond to, about biases, about framing. That, I think, is something that needs to be incorporated into the way that ideas about strategic action are developed and communicated. 你可以看到两个大区域。第一个是现在正在开发的系统，用于利用、校对和解释不同的信息来源，包括关于其他人在想什么的信息。第二个差别很大的问题是，人们认识到战略是一门艺术。这是有科学依据的，但归根结底，这是一门艺术。我们从认知心理学的发展中学到了很多关于人们如何思考，他们对什么做出反应，关于偏见，关于框架。我认为，这是需要纳入战略行动的想法的发展和沟通的方式。 What do you think that business leaders and practitioners of strategy should be reading about to avail themselves of the latest thinking in strategy? 你认为商业领袖和战略实践者应该阅读哪些资料来利用最新的战略思想？ I think there’s a move away from the sort of business strategy literature that was very popular in the ’80s, ’90s, and even the last decade, which was prey to fads and fashions: sort of the idea that there’s a formula here that, if only if you apply it to your business, you’re bound to be successful. I think that problems now vary enormously, and you’re drawing, therefore, on a body of knowledge and experience that’s out there. But you need to get your diagnosis right. So it’s a more realistic, pragmatic approach, which I'd say someone like Richard Rumelt has got down very well. It’s not as exciting, possibly, as some of the Tom Peters books. But it actually may be, in the end, more useful. 我认为现在已经远离了80年代，90年代，甚至是过去十年流行的商业战略文献，这些文献是时尚和流行的猎物: 这里有一个公式，只要你把它应用到你的生意中，你一定会成功。我认为现在的问题变化很大，因此，你们是在利用外面的知识和经验。但是你需要得到正确的诊断。因此，这是一种更现实、更务实的方法，我认为像理查德·鲁梅尔特这样的人做得很好。它可能没有汤姆 · 彼得斯的一些书那么激动人心。但实际上，它最终可能更有用。 Thank you very much, Sir Lawrence, for sharing your perspectives with us on the history and evolution of strategy. 劳伦斯爵士，非常感谢您与我们分享您对战略的历史和演变的看法。 |
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