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Lawrence Freedman

Strategy MP3 CD – Unabridged, April 28, 2015

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In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives.

The range of Freedman's narrative is extraordinary, moving from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strategies of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, the strategic advice of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, the great military innovations of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, the grounding of revolutionary strategy in class struggles by Marx, the insights into corporate strategy found in Peter Drucker and Alfred Sloan, and the contributions of the leading social scientists working on strategy today. The core issue at the heart of strategy, the author notes, is whether it is possible to manipulate and shape our environment rather than simply become the victim of forces beyond one's control. Time and again, Freedman demonstrates that the inherent unpredictability of this environment—subject to chance events, the efforts of opponents, the missteps of friends—provides strategy with its challenge and its drama. Armies or corporations or nations rarely move from one predictable state of affairs to another, but instead feel their way through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated, requiring a reappraisal of the original strategy, including its ultimate objective. Thus the picture of strategy that emerges in this book is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting point, not the end point.

A brilliant overview of the most prominent strategic theories in history, from David's use of deception against Goliath, to the modern use of game theory in economics, this masterful volume sums up a lifetime of reflection on strategy.

Language

English
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Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio
Publication date

April 28, 2015
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6.75 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
ISBN-10

1501227726
ISBN-13

978-1501227721
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King's College London since 1982, and Vice-Principal since 2003. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and awarded the CBE in 1996, he was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997. He was awarded the KCMG in 2003. In June 2009 he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War. Professor Freedman has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the cold war, as well as commentating regularly on contemporary security issues. His most recent book, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (April 28, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501227726
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501227721
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,802,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,275 in Military Strategy History (Books)
- #11,318 in History & Theory of Politics
- #12,187 in Books on CD

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William K. Berkson

Magnificant and maddening.

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2014

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This book is both magnificent and maddening. It is magnificent in its amazing scope, with short summaries and interesting insights on practically every strategic thinker in history, and many others who are not thought of as strategists, but whom Freedman rightly and insightfully includes. It is maddening in its failure to actually address the question of what strategy is best, under what conditions. In fact, the book is mis-titled, because it is not about strategy, but about theories of strategy. It could be more accurately titled: "The Pretensions of Strategists: A History," because that is its actual theme.

What is most maddening about the book is its consistent ducking responsibility for saying that any strategy is good under certain circumstances. It is an "academic" book in both the best and worst ways. It has massive erudition, keen critical intelligence and brilliant insights. But it sticks to criticism, and fails to offer any positive advice on good strategy. For every thinker Freedman follows this formula: he summarizes the theory of the thinker, describes the initial case for it or temporary success, and then points out where it has failed. Then he magisterially pronounces all views limited in applicability. This is a maddening ivory tower game, because the author is so risk averse that in his evasion of possible criticism he avoids also avoids insights that might actually be helpful to a decision maker.

In spite of the avoidance of positive recommendations, Freedman does have themes that he keeps coming back to, and are interesting and informative. One of these themes is that leaders often radically get wrong what can be accomplished by victory in a battle. G.W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" is the most glaring example of this, but Freedman has numerous other illustrations, including Napoleon. In this respect, clearly Clausewitz is one of his heroes for his insight that battles need to serve political ends.

As far as military strategy, one of Freedman's really interesting insights is that the decisive thing in wars is more often alliances more than any cleverness on the battle field. The weight of allies tips the balance. This would indicate, as with Napoleon and Hitler, ISIL has now doomed itself by allying the world against it.

A third theme, and the one that he returns to most and is perhaps the most innovative in the book is that persuasion is a key part of strategic leadership, whether in battle, politics or business. Freedman's breathtaking breadth of scope really works in discussing this theme, where he brings people as disparate as Foucault and Lee Atwater into the same story--rightly.

I couldn't put the book down, all 650 pages of it, and will return to study parts of it, which I made note of. But I had the weird sensation of being continually dazzled, grateful, and disappointed all at the same time.

90 people found this helpful

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William J. Bahr

“Plan” to read this strategy book!

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2021

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This book encompasses all you wanted to know about strategy…and more. It was written by a subject-matter expert who has spent his life studying, teaching, and writing about strategy, as well as serving on the Official UK Inquiry into the Iraq War. So be prepared for a 768-page fact-dense book that at many times is not an easy read. In addition, the author may carry you into strategic territories and topics for which you have no immediate interest. My advice? Read the introduction and then the last chapter before diving into the book. As well, read the Table of Contents to find those areas that interest you. If a chapter you start doesn’t hold your attention, skip it and keep going. You can always come back to it later or just know that it exists as a ready-reference when using the well-developed index. Unfortunately, especially for those without the Kindle version and its search function, there is no separate bibliography beyond the references embedded into the Notes.

While my background in strategic study does not easily compare with the author’s, I do agree with the common dictionary definition that strategy is essentially a plan to obtain a goal. The author finds fault with this, saying it is much more when he writes:

"There is no agreed-upon definition of strategy that describes the field and limits its boundaries. One common contemporary definition describes it as being about maintaining a balance between ends, ways, and means; about identifying objectives; and about the resources and methods available for meeting such objectives. … By and large, strategy comes into play where there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns."

All I can say to that is simply that one must plan to change plans! And that “failure to plan is planning to fail.” All this involves thinking and practice to gain facility. Despite any apparent objection, I believe the author understands this as well.

Now on to the more about the book. Again, it will likely not be a quick read for most. The author develops many high-level concepts that may be hard to hold in one’s mind, making it difficult to follow his train of thought. But, again, don’t get lost in the forest for the trees. Move on! Even then, however, as one reads the various vignettes of strategic actors, one even wonders if they had a plan (or strategy, with its definition changing throughout the book per different theorists), or just muddled along and lucked out, being in the right place at the right time. All’s well that ends well? We must have had a plan to be so successful, didn’t we? Regardless, the author sometimes throws out very few breadcrumbs to show you his path.

Sections I especially liked include the one on Saul Alinsky, the “notorious” author of “Rules for Radicals,” where Freedman mentions several hilarious solutions Alinsky used for getting his way. I also enjoyed many of Freedman’s comments about “universal” strategist John Boyd, whom I’d just recently discovered elsewhere. Boyd: “We need to deny our adversary the possibility of uncovering or discerning patterns that match our activity, or other aspects of reality in the world.” In addition, I appreciated the author’s recognition that luck (both good and bad) can play an important part in results, as does persuasion, when it aggregates, orients, and shapes our friends, enemies, and frenemies.

In the way of improvement, I could only wish that the author had spent a little more on some of the simpler aspects of strategy, things like option analysis, back-planning, and concepts found in chess, a subject the author seemed to dismiss quickly.

Overall, I thought the book was very well-researched, written, and produced. I found only one easily-corrected Kindle typo (page 446: At water vs. Atwater), which does not appear in the printed version. As I write this review, I might add that there are very few highlights in the Kindle version of the book. Perhaps my own many highlights of the things I think important will somehow be passed along to help future readers.

If you need further help in deciding to purchase, take advantage of the “Look Inside” feature to see the many, many strategic topics the author covers.

Bottom line, for the serious student of strategy, I highly recommend this Freedman masterpiece.

Of possible interest: Strategy Pure and Simple: Essential Moves for Winning in Competition and Cooperation and
George Washington’s Liberty Key: Mount Vernon’s Bastille Key – the Mystery and Magic of Its Body, Mind, and Soul , a best-seller at Mount Vernon. “Character is Key for Liberty!”

4 people found this helpful

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CAPT Barney Rubel, USN (ret)

A Needed Dose of Analysis

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2019

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Having groped my way through strategy making on several occasions (one being the development of the 2007 National Maritime Strategy) and having taught military planning and decision making for a number of years at the Naval War College, I found myself as a bit of a strategy skeptic, at least in the sense that it appears to me that frequently what is billed as strategy really isn't. Both the teaching in the NWC Strategy and Policy course and the logic embedded in the principal texts on strategy are based on an unchallenged embedded optimism that good strategy will produce good results. Freedman's book provides a welcome and necessary corrective to that tacit assumption. Meticulously broad, encompassing the realms of business, politics and drama in addition to most every corner of military strategy, as well as its theoretical aspects, Freedman succeeds in creating a unified picture of strategy without conflating the abstract notion with its specific instantiations. This book should be, and likely is, required reading for all faculty that undertake to teach strategy, and is worthwhile for anyone with an interest in the subject.

5 people found this helpful

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John Ferngrove

Even more interesting than i expected

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 4, 2020

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When i plumped for a book on strategy from a professor of war studies i was expecting lots of campaigns, battles and generals. What i actually got was something rather more subtle, that was more like a history of the social sciences seen through the lens of the rather difficult to pin down notion of strategy. The book breaks pretty clearly down into four sections.

The first section looks at military strategy which begins with a fairly brisk trot through Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Liddell Hart and their ilk before settling in to the interesting developments at the RAND Corporation in the 50s and 60s and the evolution of the strategies of nuclear deterrence. Game theory comes up a lot in this book and it is first aired here. From here on we concentrate on US military strategic doctrine and its repeated failures to find a solution to assymetric insurgencies with massive firepower, first in Vietnam, then later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The overall conclusion here is that no one has been able to develop a reliable model for optimal military strategies, and if there is such a thing as military strategic genius, a question that is difficult to answer, then nobody thus far has come up with a reliable summary of what it amounts to.

The second section is the one i found most interesting and deals with political strategy, first from the point of view of social transformation through revolution and then at the conduct of election campaigns as fought out in democracies, again with the US being the focus. The role of ideology, propaganda and media messaging is pretty thoroughly examined here. I already had the basic background of Marx and Engels, the Internationals, Lenin and Trotsky, etc. but i was introduced to quite a few thinkers and activists here that i had never previously encountered or payed proper attention to.

The third section examines strategy from the point of view of business, mostly of the large corporate variety. The initial chapters were very interesting looking at the evolving approaches of Henry Ford and then Alfred Sloan at General Motors in the construction of corporate organisations on hitherto unknown scales. However, i found this section gradually became more hard work as we moved along to look at the management consultancy doctrines and fads of the 60s right up to the 2008 crash. I found this tough going in particular because it reminded me so much of some of the more awkward and frustrating aspects of my own working life. This was really my problem rather than the book's so it keeps its five stars.

The final section is sort of an attempt to draw a general summary of what has gone before but it also brings in Kahnamen and Tversky's work on the irrationality of most human decision making, first with respect to economics but then for its implications for all those corporate management fads and their competing claims to have identified reliable and decisive strategic formulae. The book ends by asking the question to what extent post hoc analyses of strategic successes are really rationalisations of processes that were objectively as much matters of luck as judgement.

In summary this book was not what i was expecting but turned out to be very wide ranging and thought provoking, introducing me to a wide variety of thinkers and their ideas. Very worthwhile.

6 people found this helpful

Louai R

If you're going to read one serious book on strategy, let it be this.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2017

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If you're going to read one serious book on strategy, let it be this. I could not imagine a more comprehensive and holistic approach; starting from primates and spanning through biblical times and all the way to modern warfare, Freedman studies meticulously the evolution of strategic thought. He then ventures onto the world of business strategy, how it evolved and how it was influenced by strategies of warfare; an impeccably researched chapter incorporating an analysis of all major management theories on strategy. The behavioral and social elements are also examined. This book is for serious strategy enthusiasists; a long heavy read that will prove very rewarding if you are drawn to the world of strategy.

17 people found this helpful

Adrian J. Smith

An epic work

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2017

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A very ambitious and mammoth work, Freedman attempts to espouse, in a single volume, all the various forms of strategy, under every respective lens, and pretty much succeeds.
Contained is every conceivable strategy, from Biblical understandings of the role of divine intervention, to an examination of Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein Satan is a Machiavellian fallen Angel, competing against a superior opponent in a struggle he cannot possibly win.
As one may expect, all the major exponents of strategy are examined, including Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Clausewitz. Indeed, the two latter strategists, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, receive the most frequent reference outside of their own respective chapters.
An interesting part to note is the section on strategies of mass movements, particularly those of Revolutionaries, whether the theoreticians behind revolution, such as Marx and Engels, to the practitioners of revolutionary Marxism, particularly Rosa Luxemburg.
The Civil Rights era contains interesting reference points, and it is entirely ironic that the fatal errors of the opponents of civil rights are replaying such errors in this present day, such as heavy handed responses that simply galvanize the opposition and attract wider sympathy for the cause.
The section on Mao Zedong is of particular note, examining the role of strategy that ran contrary to official Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary strategy was applied to a largely agricultural nation, and in some ways how Maoism earned its place as a unique revolutionary strategy.
The section on management strategy and the latter chapters become slightly muddled, and by the time these sections are reached, the book seems somewhat overlong, but that in itself is not a serious glitch on what is otherwise a masterful work.
A work for all times and all peoples, which in time should earn itself a high place in the world literary cannon.

5 people found this helpful

DT

Tome on Strategy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 13, 2021

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The author explores Strategy from basic animal instincts, through war, politics, business and philosophy.

Exceptionally well-researched and rich with historical facts, quotes and stories.

Some problems with the way the Notes section is displayed in the Kindle book format was only a slight distraction.

Highly recommended for students of strategy as a fantastic overview that links the thoughts on this fascinating subject across the ages.

Martin

If you're into the topic it is a great read. Also

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2017

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Very entertaining and far less pompous and academic than I expected. If you're into the topic it is a great read.
Also, Freedman has structured the book in short digestible chapters which makes the whole thing a lot more approachable.

One person found this helpful

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