Moses increased his demands with the pressure. At the start, he asked only for a chance to pray, but this turned into a chance to escape. … A threat that might have been sufficient to obtain compliance with modest demands became inadequate as the stakes were raised… Pharaoh was a most unpleasant man, whose continuing deceit and double-dealing contrasted with the courtesy and dignity exhibited by Moses at all times.STRATEGY , A HISTORY
Indirect competitive logic
- Use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition
- Complicate his problems of competing with you
- Impose asymmetric costs on an opponent
- Strategic objective – set by a leader as a means to an end
- Works by harnessing power and applying it where it matters – greatest effect
Before the plagues started, God told Moses: “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.” … God needed an obstinate Pharaoh because the only way he could demonstrate the full range of his power, and its superiority over all other powers on earth, was to put on the most awesome display. If Pharaoh had crumbled at the first plague there would have been no wondrous reports to pass down to future generations. STRATEGY , A HISTORY
Bad Strategy Detection
- Bad objective – fail to address critical issues or impracticable
- Assumes that goals are all you need – Faluire to face challenge
- Fluf-Sunday words – mistakes goals for strategy
- Flourishes because it floats above analysis, logic, and choice, without hope to avoid dealing with fundamentals and difficulties
- A belief that all you need is a positive mindset
- Active avoidance of hard work to craft a good strategy
- Avoidance of pain or difficulty of choice – Essential difficulty
- The problem of choice might come from a paradox
- Economist Arrow received a noble prize – Group Irrationality is a central property of democratic voting
- Difficult psychological, political and organizational work in saying no to a whole world of hope, dreams
Disbelief in the momentum “aere perennius” – a decided disadvantage, attending the termination of metaphysical modes of thought, is that the individual fixes his mind too attentively upon his own brief lifetime and feels no strong inducement to aid in the foundation of institutions capable of enduring for centuries: he wishes himself to gather the fruit from the tree that he plants and consequently, he no longer plants those trees which require centuries of constant cultivation and are destined to afford shade to generation after generation in the future. HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN , 1878