To confront and solve your managerial challenges armed with a copy of said tome is not that helpful. As Lucy Kellaway in her recent column in the FT and AFR pointed out – where is the enemy? When I went to business school it was very trendy (and may still be) to quote Sun Tzu ( The Art of War) as a short-cut solution to managerial problems. It’s faddy, it’s inaccurate and it’s just plain wrong. As if the words ‘attracting and retaining our valuable staff members’ is not emphatic enough, the phrase ‘the war for talent’ is being used in its place. The greatest ‘distortion’ of the word ‘war’ has to be the much used term now for getting and retaining your valuable staff. Same applies to want or poverty…indeed quite a lot of the want is a by-product of the various wars being raged from time to time be it in Africa or in the Middle-east at present. The war on cancer is presumably to save lives. To kill is the mechanism by which wars are won. Outside of the horror of a conventional battle between two nations (the true definition of war) everything gets a lot more fuzzy. I’ve been watching the excellent Netflix series Narcos and it is clear that the whole drug trade is a complex web of competing or coinciding interests and not as straight-forward as say fighting the Hun. So, straight away, the word ‘war’ starts to seem inadequate at best or inappropriate at worst in most situations. Take drugs for example. It suggests an enemy with less moral authority than us (although they are saying the exact same thing on the other side).In order to prevail, sacrifices will need to be made but the greater good is more important No-one can win a war unless all military resources are effectively deployed It suggests a real sense of campaign and co-ordinated planning.It suggests we’re really serious about things now.I suspect that the use of ‘war’ as a metaphor is deployed for a number of reasons: We have the war on terror, the war on drugs, war on crime, war on cancer, the war on want, the war on poverty and the war for talent to name but a few. For example the ‘F’ bomb is now so frequently peppered into modern parlance that it’s shock value has diluted. When you over-use a word it takes the sting out of it. Rather I want to talk about the over-use of the word ‘war’. Whether this is necessarily a bad thing is much more in the realms of a military strategist (which I’m not) to determine. ![]() A not surprising response to that has been the declaration of War against the perpetrators. In recent weeks we have seen the outrage that terror brings from the Beirut attacks, the downing of the Russian airliner in the Sinai, to the Paris killings. Despite being released 45 years ago, when it is played it still seems to resonate, partly I guess because war is something that persists and its value is still questionable. It was a protest song written about the Vietnam War and was a huge hit worldwide. In 1970 Edwin Starr recorded a song written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong that was produced on the Motown label.
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