What Sun Tzu and Eisenhower share (but we’re deaf to)

I was thinking today of the treatise The Art of War, written in the 6th Century BC by Sun Tzu and considered the most relevant tome on military strategy and tactics in history. Actually, if you look at the 13 chapters that conform it, you quickly understand how the structure and items proposed have been used more than any in military planning (in East and in West). They have also extended in recent decades to business strategy and planning. Find an ultra-short briefing of these 13 chapters here

There is a very famous quote of this book I came across the other day in Jordan Bortz’s blog which goes like this:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

The reason this caught my attention was a recent debate I witnessed inside my organisation on waterfall versus agile methodologies for software development, whereby some considered waterfall (sequential software development model) as a purely strategic method whereas they claimed agile was purely tactical. I think this is a limitation and narrowing of both methodologies that’s not fair to either.

I believe you can use agile in a full fledged strategic manner as long as you manage agile actions and scrum teams in the context of a clearly visible and well communicated strategic endeavour. Probably managing this obeys a different order and formal logic than a waterfall project, but I am certain agile can be used in a mid or long term strategic context and at the same time respect it’s governing principles.

However, I still hold truth some basic notions, one of which would go something like this, as Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable

More also from Damon Poole, who has a bit of a fight on the topic with the above mentioned Jordan.

Nearshoring, outsourcing or else…

When considering nearshoring, outsourcing or other externalisation of processes, a number of strategic considerations have to be taken into account. I read a very synthetic (3 points) but spot on approach in Harvard Business Review recently on the subject which I would like to share:

1. List all your capabilities – including HR, finance, IT management, logistics distribution, product development, and packaging
2. Identify capabilities with high proprietary value. Your company executes these in ways that generate measurably more value than rivals could. And your company would suffer major strategic damage if rivals imitated them.
3. Identify capabilities with high commonality. Outside suppliers could achieve scale or other advantages by providing these to many others in your industry

An interesting note: only 6% of companies which outsource are satisfied with the practise (source: HBR).

Commonality identification illustration flow from esi.es

Diagonal scaling, diminishing returns

Diagonal scaling is making a site faster by removing machines. The term was created by John Allspaw, the operations manager of Flickr, who replaced 67 dual-cpu boxes with 18 dual quad-core machines and recovered almost 4x rack space and reduced costs by about 50%

Horizontal scaling (scaling out) means adding or removing client workstations with only a slight performance impact. Vertical scaling (scaling up) means migrating to a larger and faster server machine or multiservers.

See a video by CIO of CNET, on scaling out and don’t miss the 8 fallacies of distributed computing… and the 9th one!

The Law of Diminisging Returns, referred to also as variable factor proportions, states that

as equal quantities of one variable factor are increased, while other factor inputs remain constant -ceteris paribus- a point is reached beyond which the addition of one more unit of the variable factor will result in a diminishing rate of return and the marginal physical product will fall.

I think the reason I was associating these 2 is because I thought: In Allspaw’s model of diagonal scaling, this law is not only undermined, but is infact inverted.

Illustration of scaling up and out from the microsoft web applications libraries