- What Is Grand Strategy?
- The Grand Strategy To Cast Off the Corporate State
- Strategic Frameworks, Part 2
- Executing Strategy, Part 3
A Grand Strategy is the alignment of your means and ends in your strategy. This alignment requires a clear understanding of all of your resources (not just money or power). It also requires that your values actually be the source of your ends, if not the only source.
The best way to explain your Grand Strategy is as a narrative of some depth and detail. If there are problems in your strategy, they will best be identified as flaws or holes in your narrative.
The other advantage of a narrative as a tool for framing your Grand Strategy is that all narratives focus on process rather than a state. In line with the discussion about complex adaptive systems, a process view provides a deeper understanding of the possibilities and constraints of your strategy. Narrative as a process also makes it easier to see the need for altering during the process by using your Grand Strategy as a guide to change.
A Grand Strategy gives you a place to start in how your strategy deals with the stuff you can control and the stuff you can’t. It allows you to make use of the stuff you can’t control by choosing a strategy that gets benefits from the forces and constraints in the larger world that you can’t really change. Think about the difference between traveling downstream in a river and using its current or traveling upstream in a river and fighting its current.
We often have a grand strategy, but it is implicit and so we don’t see the contradictions in our vision. Articulating and rearticulating our Grand Strategy helps us to avoid outcomes that undermine that vision,
