How the slaughter of 70 000 Romans can help you write better strategies.

It’s 216 BC, in the middle of the Second Punic War between Rome, and Carthage, led by the legendary General, Hannibal. Now camped at Cannae, just south of Rome, Hannibal has already routed the Romans at the Ticunus River as well as at the Trebia River where a large army was easily dealt with, and he continues a relentless advance towards Rome.

The Romans, fearing for the very future of their republic send the greatest army they have ever assembled to meet and, hopefully, defeat him conclusively. 80 000 Infantrymen and 7 000 cavalry leave the gates of the city to meet an army roughly half that size. And Roman soldiers weren’t a bunch of conscripts grabbed off the streets. They were trained professionals. They killed for a living.

The day the armies met remains the single bloodiest day in the history of human conflict. At its end, roughly 76 000 soldiers had been killed. More than 70 000 of them Romans. In just one day, Rome lost almost its entire population of men of military age.

How did Hannibal achieve this? It’s not like he had superior weaponry here; it was not as if he had invented the Gatling Gun or the Sherman Tank and, despite what you’ve heard, very few of the elephants made it over the Alps.

He certainly didn’t have the force of numbers.

But he did have a strategy, and that’s what did it for him. And you’ll be surprised to discover just how simple that strategy was.

He placed his least reliable troops (the Gauls and the Spaniards if you must know) at the front and centre of his battle ranks, knowing they would retreat if the fighting became too intense. At the sides, he placed his most dependable, elite African foot soldiers. As predicted, the Gauls and Spaniards retreated when things really kicked off, and the Romans streamed inwards and onwards to fill the vacuum their departure had created, more and more convinced that victory lay just a little further ahead.

What they didn’t notice as they rushed forwards was the ranks of elite African soldiers and cavalry closing behind them. Until they were completely surrounded and decimated and the Strategy known as ‘The Cauldron’ had been perfectly executed.

The Cauldron Strategy wasn’t a new one, but it was a popular one that had been in use since primitive times. Shaka was a big fan of it too, with his “bull’s horns”. And it even makes an appearance in Game of Thrones. What makes the strategy such an effective one, like most effective military strategies — it’s been pointed out that there are really only thirteen strategies you need to win any battle— is its inherent simplicity. Simply conceived, simply expressed — ‘attack from all sides’ — and simply executed — ‘prevent retreat; ‘destroy in place’. That’s the entire strategy of the greatest military battle ever — three phrases.

It’s strategy’s job to make things simpler, not more complicated. Instead, we sit through four hours of tedium as someone shares with us their ‘learnings’ regarding the ‘sugar-enriched flavoured drinks category and how the consumer within the category engages with the brands therein’. If you are especially lucky, you may even receive a discourse on the kind of ‘conversation’ said consumers have with their brands. You’ll certainly be treated to at least an hour of numerous, irrelevant “insights” when really, all you need is just one good one.

It’s time advertising strategy went back to basics and rediscovered the principles that entitled it to be called strategy in the first place.

Despite what strategic planners will try to tell you, strategy isn’t a complicated process. Nor is it an arcane art only accessible to those who’ve mastered the mysteries of MAPS data or facilitating focus groups. In fact, a strategy needs no more than just three components: a Diagnosis, a Guiding Policy and a set of Coherent Actions — taken all together, what Richard Rumelt calls a Kernel.

The Diagnosis is exactly that, the answer to the question ‘what’s going on here?’ and involves asking questions regarding the current situation of the brand — where is it? Why is it there? How did it get there? What’s about to happen? And a good diagnosis will simplify the often overwhelming complexity of reality by highlighting only what’s critical. Great strategies have to make sacrifices to succeed. Choosing what’s important here and what isn’t, is the first sacrifice you should make.

A Guiding Policy is the overall approach or idea chosen in dealing with the particular challenge identified in the diagnosis, for instance, “attack from all sides.” It should be succinct, clear and unambiguous for anyone to understand and should channel actions and thoughts in a particular direction rather than dictating or defining specific actions to be carried out. Good ones provide the method for grappling with a challenge while at the same time, ruling out a vast array of actions. It is the policy that focuses the actions to come by eradicating the undesirable actions. A good guiding policy allows even those down the chain of command to react correctly in a situation for which they have not been prepared.

And the final strategy component is a set of Coherent Tactics. Without specific action, we do not have a strategy, no matter how inspiring and powerfully expressed the guiding policy is expressed. The set of Coherent Tactics contains the specific actions which, when acting in concert, will accomplish the guiding policy. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of every possible action that can be brought to bear on the challenge, but it should cover enough to show how the ideals of the Guiding Policy can be brought down to Earth.

Hannibal’s Strategy, in full?

Diagnosis: we’re vastly outnumbered and their army is made up of highly trained professionals. But their superiority makes them overconfident.

Guiding Principle: use their overconfidence against them by luring them into a trap from which there’s no escape.

Coherent Tactics: Fake retreat, ‘attack from all sides’, ’prevent their retreat; ‘destroy in place’ = Cauldron.

Simply conceived. Simply expressed. Simply executed. And it didn’t need 240 slides. And let’s be honest, for a strategy to have any chance of success, it needs to be widely adopted in your organization. The easier you make it for that to happen; the shorter more focused you make it, the better.

So next time you’re faced with the challenge of selling sweet, fizzy water, and you feel a 50 page treatise coming on, ask yourself, “What Would Hannibal Do?”

And keep it under ten slides.