Consulting Journal: Trends - Consultants and generals

This article is reprinted from The Consulting Journal
http://www.consultingjournal.com

Trends: Consultants and generals

by David Blakey

Are your clients running their businesses like Iraqi generals?

[Monday 21 April 2003]

I dislike the practice of finding artificial parallels between business and war. I see no merit in taking excerpts from The Art of War by Sun Tzu and trying to apply them to business. Despite this, I have to admit that analysis of the war in Iraq does yield some interesting points that I have also seen in some businesses.

John Keegan wrote in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper that the Iraq decision-makers either had no plan for the war or had a plan that was flawed and that ignored the basics of successful military planning.

The port at Umm Qasr should have been sabotaged, to make the coalition's entry more difficult.
The best forces - the Republican Guard - should have been sent against the coalition forces on their march north, with other forces being kept in reserve.
Where the Republican Guard stopped the coalition from advancing, the regular army should have been brought in to hold the coalition forces where they were, while the Republican Guard went off to engage other coalition forces that were still advancing.
Bridges across rivers should have been destroyed to attempt to slow the coalition advance.

This would have been the basic plan that military officers trained at West Point or Sandhurst would have adopted. Iraqi officers have, of course, not been trained in the US or UK for some time.

I know, from my own experience as a consultant with the US Army, the huge difficulties that an advancing army faces. If it has tanks, then it must have other vehicles that carry spares, such as tank tracks, and other vehicles that carry tools, and other vehicles that carry maintenance staff. All the personnel in the tanks and the support vehicles need food, so there are other support vehicles that carry food. All of these vehicles require fuel, so there are yet more vehicles, more people and more supplies. All of these vehicles and people and supplies need to be defended, so the cycle begins again. It is an immense and complex undertaking.

A defending army should know what these difficulties are and try to exploit them.

None of this occurred.

The coalition's points of entry were left mainly intact.
The weakest forces were committed first and then either retreated or surrendered.
Because of this, the advance was hardly impeded, but there were no forces available to hold the coalition if it had been stopped.
Bridges were not destroyed. Coalition forces carried bridges with them to replace those that they were sure the Iraqi army would destroy as it retreated north ahead of them. Few of them were used.

In addition to all this, during the advance, the Republican Guard in Baghdad were attacked repeatedly from the air, so that they were mainly ineffective several days before they could have been put into battle.

It can appear that there was no plan at all. The only part of the plan that seems to have worked was the escape of the leadership, having raided the central bank, once the rest of the plan had failed.

Now consider some parts of the coalition plan that seemed mysterious at the time. Why should there have been such a concentration of air attacks on the Iraqi telephone system? The answer may be that coalition intelligence had revealed that this was the major medium of communication between the command and the forces. While the coalition's sophisticated systems allowed simultaneous communications between commanders in a number of locations in the middle east, Iraq seems to have depended on the telephone system for simple two-way communication between a single headquarters and each military unit.

Add to this the apparent confidence of the Iraqi regime that it would defeat the coalition quickly. Before the conflict started, and even in the first few days, Iraqi television showed senior government officials and army officers who gave the impression that they had a plan, that it was a good plan, and that it would be a successful plan.

The parallels with business are unmistakable. As consultants we often see the following.

Smug confidence in a plan that does not take into consideration the strength and resourcefulness of the opposition. Some businesses underrate their competitors because they know little about them.
Poor - and sometimes untruthful - communication from headquarters to those who will have to implement the plan. Some businesses need to make strong positive statements about their planning in order to prevent anyone lower down from asking whether the plan will work. In some cases, the people lower down have to be discouraged from asking if there actually is a plan.
Planning that ignores the traditional methods of achieving success and that embraces unproven and mainly theoretical methods. Businesses need innovation, but there are some sound establsished methods that they ignore at their peril.
A management team that has limited experience. Some businesses have management teams that consist almost entirely of people who have ‘grown up’ with the business.
Inadequate contingency planning. When the main plan fails, the contingency planning should be robust enough to allow something other than utter defeat.

This is why consultants are so useful, provided that they do real work rather than just check other people's work. Some opportunities are: preparing realistic, flexible and pragmatic project plans; building communications plans that recognise the intelligence of their audience; using best practice, with innovation added sensibly; using experience and skills in the client's sector; and planning for contingencies.

Consultants and generals should have these abilities.