The Art of Action: Leadership that Closes the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results eBook: Stephen Bungay: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Review

Shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year Award 2011-2012 (Practical Manager category)

"Stephen Bungay has something genuinely interesting to tell us. His book is not one of those vacuous essays in "leadership qualities" of the "how would Napoleon/MacArthur/Alexander the Great have turned around General Motors" variety ... What makes this book worth reading is the way in which Mr. Bungay calls time on an entire culture of gobbledygook. You don't succeed in warfare by having vague objectives and issuing ambiguous orders. And you shouldn't expect to succeed in business that way, either."
Laurence Eyton, Wall Street Journal

"What do you get if you cross a military historian with a management consultant? You get this fascinating book by Stephen Bungay ... Bungay is as comfortable with management as he is with history and here cleverly draws on his knowledge of the latter to influence his thinking ... A must-read for any would-be strategist.
Director Magazine

"We live in an age of strategic failure across the board in international relations and economic affairs, on the battlefield as well as in the marketplace. Inventively and incisively, Stephen Bungay draws on Clausewitz's wisdom, military history, business literature, and common sense to develop the notion of directed opportunism for breaking the ominous cycle of frustration."
Jonathan Stevenson, Professor of Strategic Studies, U.S. Naval War College

"Leadership is an intangible value. What sets Stephen Bungay apart is that he draws upon his deep knowledge of historical military campaigns to highlight key leadership principles and then sets them in the context of modern business with an understanding of the particular challenges faced by each company he works for. The first part greatly entertains and captivates the audience and the second part really brings home the teachings we wish to impart. The results have been very good."
Tom Glocer, CEO, Thomson Reuters
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The Art of Action is a must for anyone in business who takes their leadership responsibilities seriously. Stephen Bungay draws upon his deep understanding of business strategy and military history and describes principles in his book that will have a real impact for those who adopt them. The Art of Action is the strategic handbook for today built on the insights of yesterday. This will be compulsory reading for all of my unit heads."
liot Forster, CEO, Solace Pharmaceuticals

"All too often, strategies fail to be implemented because they do not make tough choices between priorities and therefore leave people confused. The eminently pragmatic techniques described in this book are a great way of sharpening up the thinking, the communication and the sense of accountability needed to get an organisation moving. The ideas sound simple, but they are very powerful."
Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor, The Open University

"Stephen Bungay s career as CEO, management consultant and historian enable him to bring a unique clarity to leadership and the art of making strategy happen. His study of the chastened Prussian military machine analysing why it was defeated by Napoleon s peasant army is illuminated with anecdotes from his career in business. It is this blend of evidence from the military to the business environment which makes this book so useful to the modern day practitioner!"
David Roblin, Senior Vice President, Pfizer Global R&D

"This is not just another book about strategy. The Art of Action does not only present a radical, counter-cultural solution to the impasse business is facing today but it is grounded in real strategic execution in a fascinating organisation. It is the Re-engineering The Corporation of the 21st century. I intend to send a copy to all my clients."
Aidan Walsh, Partner, Ernst & Young

"The Art of Action by management consultant and historian Stephen Bungay is a must-read for those who strive to understand how to keep up in the cut-throat world of business. Business, like war, is a vicious, competitive human creation where there are no prizes for coming second. As such, raising and leading successful armies has much in common with building a thriving business and succeeding in commerce"
Management Today

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The Art of Action is a must for anyone in business who takes their leadership responsibilities seriously. Stephen Bungay draws upon his deep understanding of business strategy and military history and describes principles in his book that will have a real impact for those who adopt them. The Art of Action is the strategic handbook for today built on the insights of yesterday. This will be compulsory reading for all of my unit heads."
liot Forster, CEO, Solace Pharmaceuticals

"All too often, strategies fail to be implemented because they do not make tough choices between priorities and therefore leave people confused. The eminently pragmatic techniques described in this book are a great way of sharpening up the thinking, the communication and the sense of accountability needed to get an organisation moving. The ideas sound simple, but they are very powerful."
Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor, The Open University

"Stephen Bungay s career as CEO, management consultant and historian enable him to bring a unique clarity to leadership and the art of making strategy happen. His study of the chastened Prussian military machine analysing why it was defeated by Napoleon s peasant army is illuminated with anecdotes from his career in business. It is this blend of evidence from the military to the business environment which makes this book so useful to the modern day practitioner!"
David Roblin, Senior Vice President, Pfizer Global R&D

"This is not just another book about strategy. The Art of Action does not only present a radical, counter-cultural solution to the impasse business is facing today but it is grounded in real strategic execution in a fascinating organisation. It is the Re-engineering The Corporation of the 21st century. I intend to send a copy to all my clients."
Aidan Walsh, Partner, Ernst & Young

"The Art of Action by management consultant and historian Stephen Bungay is a must-read for those who strive to understand how to keep up in the cut-throat world of business. Business, like war, is a vicious, competitive human creation where there are no prizes for coming second. As such, raising and leading successful armies has much in common with building a thriving business and succeeding in commerce"
Management Today

--...

Product Description

Executing strategy is an enduring management problem. There is often a significant gap between what managers plan, what they do and the outcome they achieve. Stephen Bungay finds a fresh approach from an unexpected source—the nineteenth-century Prussian Army. His solution is based not on theory, but on sets of practices that have evolved over many years in the fast-moving, unpredictable environment of the battlefield. This engaging narrative demonstrates how to set direction, how to agree on what people need to do to realize their objectives and how to enable them to be successful in the complex, dynamic arena of modern business. It offers a fresh, holistic approach to strategy, communication and leadership, encouraging people to practice the few simple things that really make a difference.

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

Learning from the Prussians 14 Dec 2010

By Peter Acton

Format:Hardcover

One reason to maintain faith in human nature is the extraordinary number of senior business people who profess, and sometimes display, an interest in the humanities. For many, military history is a special interest and they are likely to have read Bungay's previous books which offered a management perspective on the Battle of Britain (The Most Dangerous Enemy) and Alamein. Bungay took Clausewitz's definition of war as "a clash of organisations" as a cue for a new approach to history. His scholarly analysis explained much of Britain's success in those campaigns in terms of logistics, information flows and organisation structure with a clarity not always found in traditional management case studies. Many managers would have drawn on Bungay's observations to guide their behaviour and that of their organisations.

In The Art of Action, Bungay addresses the demand for management guidance directly. He does not do this in the obvious way by laboriously reiterating the lessons about what Britain did right in the campaigns analysed in his previous works, but takes as his model the losing side - the Prussian command system inspired by Clausewitz and established by von Moltke in the Franco-Prussian war. In doing so he answers the question that one senses was nagging at him and many readers of his World War II books: how come, even though the management of their campaigns was hopeless in so many ways compared to Britain, the Germans frequently pulled off amazing successes against the odds by doing something quite unexpected that happened to be just right in the circumstances? The answer is The Art of Action.

Though his concern is with the practical, Bungay avoids the trap that catches so much management literature of drawing conclusions from anecdotes and common sense with no clear idea of the bounds of, or reasons for, their applicability. The Art of Action is firmly grounded in theory. It describes how Auftragstaktik or "mission command" evolved through reflection on experiences, how it struggled against reactionary forces within the Prussian army, what was learned and incorporated in subsequent campaigns and how it eventually flowered in the world's first "business school" - the German War Academy. Bungay identifies three gaps that cause divergence between plans and outcomes, shows how the German system addressed them and translates the implications into a management context. Each point is incisively illustrated with examples from his own consulting "war stories" or original case studies such as the delightful check-in lady Tracey, whose ability to do the right thing for an important customer rather than follow a rule book forms a powerful demonstration of how successful organisations need to be led and managed.

Bungay's title reflects his view that "creating great organisations and devising great strategies is not a science but an art." Just as no general can know precisely what it will be best for his men to do in the heat of a forthcoming battle, no organisation theorist can define a precise set of rules that will be applicable in all circumstances for every company. The book is an attempt, to use his own phraseology, to "direct the opportunism" of managers who want to adopt a proven model of effective command. It shows how planning detail must vary according to level of authority/information, but must still be based on robust analysis of demand and competition; it provides guidance on how to achieve true alignment, emphasising the importance of rigorous and precise briefings and the backbriefing process, and it demonstrates how actors must be able to respond to changing circumstances if they are to secure their intended outcomes. Business has been slower to pick these tools up than the military and some of the first management theorists to do so have tended to miss the point by defining rules to govern behaviour in circumstances that cannot be known in advance.

The true message of Auftragstaktik is much more optimistic. It has proved that the best results come from allowing individual autonomy and that the true challenge of leadership is to secure a genuine commitment to strategic objectives rather to monitor process compliance. Bungay sets a direction for aspiring leaders to follow; the most successful will be artists, not martinets.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

Different sort of business book 28 Dec 2010

By ASTJOHN Brown

I have largely given up reading business books because most of them seem to have one big idea which they advocate as the panacea for all, or nearly all, problems. Bungay is an excellent historian so I read this hoping for something different, as well as his insights on the Prussian/German military machines of the second half of the C19th and the first half of the C20th. I'm pleased to say I found it.

What is refreshing is the degree of humility in the book - which is appropriate given van Moltke's humility. There isn't a "one size fits all", there is - as Bungay himself says, a lot of applied common sense and even the Blindingly Obvious. Discussing the issue of friction (Clausewitz's word) is a good starting point in acknowledging all of the things that can go wrong with any plan, however well intentioned the executants might be. He doesn't use Rumsfeld's description of "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", but "friction" is a nice way of summarising them. His view that there are often 3 "gaps" (Effects, Knowledge, Alignment) was new to me - and appears right - rather than the usual focus on what he calls the Alignment gap - the difference between Plans and Actions. His emphasis - from the Prussian military - on action and moving in roughly the right direction, rather than waiting for more and more information is also refreshing. His description of strategy as a framework for decision making and a guide to thoughtful purposive action also seems to sum up elegantly what its real role is. The quotation of van Moltke's directive to his commanders on 30th August 1870 (p125) needs framing in all strategic planning departments as a model for all communications.

Having stopped working for large companies a number of years ago partly because of the amount of useless internal processes - strategic plans that weren't, budgets that weren't believable, HR reviews that were politically correct - I have become uncertain how to develop a strategic plan in the small businesses I am now involved with. Thanks to the book, I am now clear in my own mind what I need to do to clarify what we, as a business, are trying to do (his boiler manufacturer example is brilliant), which gives the staff the clarity they want as well as the space to do what they do best, whilst enabling the strategic direction of the business to develop as circumstances change. The idea of writing a short brief does force one to really think (Richard Feynman's great response to a correspondent "Don't you have time to think ?!), which can be forgotten in the maelstrom of daily work. The backbrief is also an excellent suggestion for workaday use.

As I said at the start, I am somewhat out of touch with modern management literature, so can't compare his thinking with others. I suspect he wrote this book for an audience of mainly large company managers and leaders. Where I think the book may have a real impact is with the managers/entrepreneurs in smaller businesses, where the need for a strategic plan - as Bungay describes is real - but not for a strategic plan as practised by many Strategic Planning departments.

An excellent book that I read in two sittings, as I really wanted to understand how to use the insights.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Can you apply Auftragstatik to Business? 21 Sep 2011

By Mr. P. G. Chesters

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Although it is not very clear from the cover of the book and the blurb (particular there is no Look Inside) this book is about applying the Prussian-German Army Auftragstatik (Mission Command) to business. Mission command these principles are being applied to a greater or lessor extent in the US and British Army and the Israeli Defence force (see Eitan Shamir Transforming Command for this.

Strangely enough there I couldn't find a definition for Mission command in Bungay's book so I am borrowing the definition from from Shamir: it is decentralised leadership .. a philosophy that requires and facilitates initiative on all levels of command ....it encourages subordinates to exploit opportunities by empowering them to take the initiative and exercise judgement in pursuit of their mission; alignment is maintained through adherence to the commanders intent"

The book is is essence three parts, although they are intermingled throughout the book.:

- How the Auftragstatik developed and and what is is intended to solve.
- A brief critic of existing theories on strategy
- Applying Auftragstatik to the business, essentially through mini cases.

These ideas are not new, I came across them originally in Mike Davidson's The Grand Strategist.

I thought that the description of how Auftragstatik was developed and what is is designed to solve very clear, from the defeat of the Prussian army at Jena, through Clausewitz, Moltke the elder and to its success at the unit level in WWII, although I admit I am interested in military history. Bungay uses the three gaps identified by Von Moltke, which he calls the alignment gap, the knowledge gap and the effects gap, as the basis for the bulk of the book. I think the description here is far easier to understand than the comparative section in Shamir's book. My only regret is he mentions Nelson used a mission command system but did not provide more details. However, if I am wondering if this level of information is really required for a business book.

This is because I found the part where he applied the principles to business weaker and not as convincing. One reason is that in most of the cases the companies were not named or the cases are composites. Although he briefly mentions SAP and how it imposes a standardized set of operating procedures on a company, it didn't answer the question I had on how you can apply a system that allows people to make individual decisions within in line with intent to a business environment that is constrained by a centralized IT system, tight regulatory environments, and last but not least tight profit margins. In fact Shamir shows that these are some of the factors why Mission command has not been fully successfully adopted in the US and British Army.

One of the examples is of Tracey, a desk agent for BA in 1995, leaving her desk to sort out a gold card customer who had arrived at the desk late for check in, so that he got on the flight. This was based on her training to put the Gold card customer first. This example does of course illustrate Auftragstatik in action. However 1995 is along time ago, my experience is that BA doesn't demonstrate this level of service today so what went wrong.

I think the book is worth reading, hopefully you will not be as pessimistic about applying it as myself.