Strategy Audiobook
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Review #1
Strategy audiobook free
This book encompasses all you wanted to know about strategy…and more. It was written by a subject-matter expert who has spent his life studying, teaching, and writing about strategy, as well as serving on the Official UK Inquiry into the Iraq War. So be prepared for a 768-page fact-dense book that at many times is not an easy read. In addition, the author may carry you into strategic territories and topics for which you have no immediate interest. My advice? Read the introduction and then the last chapter before diving into the book. As well, read the Table of Contents to find those areas that interest you. If a chapter you start doesn’t hold your attention, skip it and keep going. You can always come back to it later or just know that it exists as a ready-reference when using the well-developed index. Unfortunately, especially for those without the Kindle version and its search function, there is no separate bibliography beyond the references embedded into the Notes.
While my background in strategic study does not easily compare with the author’s, I do agree with the common dictionary definition that strategy is essentially a plan to obtain a goal. The author finds fault with this, saying it is much more when he writes:
“There is no agreed-upon definition of strategy that describes the field and limits its boundaries. One common contemporary definition describes it as being about maintaining a balance between ends, ways, and means; about identifying objectives; and about the resources and methods available for meeting such objectives. … By and large, strategy comes into play where there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns.”
All I can say to that is simply that one must plan to change plans! And that “failure to plan is planning to fail.” All this involves thinking and practice to gain facility. Despite any apparent objection, I believe the author understands this as well.
Now on to the more about the book. Again, it will likely not be a quick read for most. The author develops many high-level concepts that may be hard to hold in one’s mind, making it difficult to follow his train of thought. But, again, don’t get lost in the forest for the trees. Move on! Even then, however, as one reads the various vignettes of strategic actors, one even wonders if they had a plan (or strategy, with its definition changing throughout the book per different theorists), or just muddled along and lucked out, being in the right place at the right time. All’s well that ends well? We must have had a plan to be so successful, didn’t we? Regardless, the author sometimes throws out very few breadcrumbs to show you his path.
Sections I especially liked include the one on Saul Alinsky, the “notorious” author of “Rules for Radicals,” where Freedman mentions several hilarious solutions Alinsky used for getting his way. I also enjoyed many of Freedman’s comments about “universal” strategist John Boyd, whom I’d just recently discovered elsewhere. Boyd: “We need to deny our adversary the possibility of uncovering or discerning patterns that match our activity, or other aspects of reality in the world.” In addition, I appreciated the author’s recognition that luck (both good and bad) can play an important part in results, as does persuasion, when it aggregates, orients, and shapes our friends, enemies, and frenemies.
In the way of improvement, I could only wish that the author had spent a little more on some of the simpler aspects of strategy, things like option analysis, back-planning, and concepts found in chess, a subject the author seemed to dismiss quickly.
Overall, I thought the book was very well-researched, written, and produced. I found only one easily-corrected Kindle typo (page 446: At water vs. Atwater), which does not appear in the printed version. As I write this review, I might add that there are very few highlights in the Kindle version of the book. Perhaps my own many highlights of the things I think important will somehow be passed along to help future readers.
Review #3
Audiobook Strategy by Lawrence Freedman
Review #4
Audio Strategy narrated by Michael Butler Murray
When i plumped for a book on strategy from a professor of war studies i was expecting lots of campaigns, battles and generals. What i actually got was something rather more subtle, that was more like a history of the social sciences seen through the lens of the rather difficult to pin down notion of strategy. The book breaks pretty clearly down into four sections.
The first section looks at military strategy which begins with a fairly brisk trot through Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Liddell Hart and their ilk before settling in to the interesting developments at the RAND Corporation in the 50s and 60s and the evolution of the strategies of nuclear deterrence. Game theory comes up a lot in this book and it is first aired here. From here on we concentrate on US military strategic doctrine and its repeated failures to find a solution to assymetric insurgencies with massive firepower, first in Vietnam, then later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The overall conclusion here is that no one has been able to develop a reliable model for optimal military strategies, and if there is such a thing as military strategic genius, a question that is difficult to answer, then nobody thus far has come up with a reliable summary of what it amounts to.
The second section is the one i found most interesting and deals with political strategy, first from the point of view of social transformation through revolution and then at the conduct of election campaigns as fought out in democracies, again with the US being the focus. The role of ideology, propaganda and media messaging is pretty thoroughly examined here. I already had the basic background of Marx and Engels, the Internationals, Lenin and Trotsky, etc. but i was introduced to quite a few thinkers and activists here that i had never previously encountered or payed proper attention to.
The third section examines strategy from the point of view of business, mostly of the large corporate variety. The initial chapters were very interesting looking at the evolving approaches of Henry Ford and then Alfred Sloan at General Motors in the construction of corporate organisations on hitherto unknown scales. However, i found this section gradually became more hard work as we moved along to look at the management consultancy doctrines and fads of the 60s right up to the 2008 crash. I found this tough going in particular because it reminded me so much of some of the more awkward and frustrating aspects of my own working life. This was really my problem rather than the book’s so it keeps its five stars.
The final section is sort of an attempt to draw a general summary of what has gone before but it also brings in Kahnamen and Tversky’s work on the irrationality of most human decision making, first with respect to economics but then for its implications for all those corporate management fads and their competing claims to have identified reliable and decisive strategic formulae. The book ends by asking the question to what extent post hoc analyses of strategic successes are really rationalisations of processes that were objectively as much matters of luck as judgement.
In summary this book was not what i was expecting but turned out to be very wide ranging and thought provoking, introducing me to a wide variety of thinkers and their ideas. Very worthwhile.
Review #5
Free audio Strategy – in the audio player below
If you’re going to read one serious book on strategy, let it be this. I could not imagine a more comprehensive and holistic approach; starting from primates and spanning through biblical times and all the way to modern warfare, Freedman studies meticulously the evolution of strategic thought. He then ventures onto the world of business strategy, how it evolved and how it was influenced by strategies of warfare; an impeccably researched chapter incorporating an analysis of all major management theories on strategy. The behavioral and social elements are also examined. This book is for serious strategy enthusiasists; a long heavy read that will prove very rewarding if you are drawn to the world of strategy.
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