Strategy: A Lesson in Leadership and Decision-Making from the Book “The Generals”
“Successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It is thinking and doing.”
— The Generals by Thomas E. Ricks
Over the past several years, I’ve embarked on a continuous learning journey to gain a comprehensive understanding of “strategy.” As I have delved deeper into this subject, a particular account from The Generals consistently reemerges, having left a strong impression on me. I’d like to share some excerpts from this story, with the hope that it will shape your understanding and approach to strategy, just as it has influenced mine.
In December of 1941, General George Marshall posed the following challenge to General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “‘Look, there are two things we have got to do. We have got to do our best in the Pacific and we’ve got to win this whole war. Now, how are we going to do it? Now, that is going to be your problem.’… ‘Give me a few hours,’ Eisenhower requested. It was a difficult assignment… ‘The question before me was almost unlimited in its applications,’ Eisenhower later wrote.”
“When Marshall returned that afternoon from his round of visits, Eisenhower gave him a three-page typed memo that laid out what he thought the American approach to World War II should be. The Philippines, Ike wrote, were beyond hope. Don’t be sentimental. Give up the islands, and leave American and Filipino friends there to their fate, while giving them what small aid we can. Fall back and regroup. Nor should the Army heed the panicky calls of West Coast politicians for military protection for their cities, which would divert desperately needed troops and gear. Rather, the initial focus of American military operations against Japan should concentrate on faraway Australia, which would have to be the launching platform for the counteroffensive. Thus, the top military priority in the Pacific would be to keep open the air and sea lanes to it, which meant holding Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand, and the other islands along the route, as well as Australia itself. That task was essential, and to carry it out successfully was worth almost any risk and expenditure.”
In his book, Ricks further explained that, “rather than looking for strategic guidance, Marshall was more likely seeing if Ike had sufficient ice in his veins to recommend that thousands of his old friends and comrades in the Philippines be abandoned, condemning them to death or a war spent as prisoners of the Japanese….‘Eisenhower,’ Marshall said, ‘the department is filled with able men who analyze their problems but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.’”
Later, in 1942, “he and an aide further developed a [broader] strategy that differentiated primary war aims from lesser ones. The three primary goals, they wrote, had to be ‘the security of England, the retention of Russia in the war as an active war ally, and the defense of the Middle East.’…Everything else was secondary, they noted, in a classic summary of the nature of strategic decision making: ‘All other operations must be considered highly desirable rather than in the mandatory class.’ The implication of that conclusion, they continued, meant that victory in Europe had to take precedence over winning in the Pacific…Prioritizing tends to be a forgotten aspect of strategy. The art of strategy is foremost not about how to do something but about what to do. In other words, the first problem is to determine what the real problem is. There are many aspects to any given problem, but the strategist must sort through them and determine its essence, for there lies the key to its solution. Eisenhower clearly understood the need to separate the essential from the merely important.”
This account emphasizes that the essence of strategy isn’t about getting everything right but rather about figuring out the right things to do. That’s what Ike did: He cut through the noise to pinpoint the real issue and had the courage to make hard choices.
As leaders, my hope is that we can skillfully navigate our own “battlefields,” consistently seeking the heart of a problem and, armed with that knowledge, that we can lead with clarity and conviction.
