Everything I Know About Strategic Management I Learned From James T. Kirk

 

As my regular readers know, I regularly tear into the risk management types for the multitude of foibles that lace their approach to project management. I think they overstate their ability to provide relevant business information, their data is far, far more subjective than they are willing to admit, and that Nasim Taleb (in The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable) was right when he asserted that overuse of the Gaussian Curve is the greatest intellectual fraud of the 20^th century. But, from a strategic management point of view, their error lies in the assumption that, given enough quantitative analysis, the best strategy can be discovered for most business situations. My take is that the best strategy is one of providing for a robust response to the unforeseeable events that will inevitably transpire on a given project, rather than attempting to calculate the likelihood and impact of such events unfolding. Is there an example out there that illustrates these rival positions?

Of course there is! (Why else would I have posed the question?) Many senior managers today had their view on the world influenced by the television series Star Trek. The original version of the series (nicknamed “the original series,” or TOS) had an iconic episode entitled “The Doomsday Machine.” In it, the starship Enterprise comes across her wrecked sister ship Constellation, which has evidently been in a horrific battle. As Captain Kirk and a boarding party investigate, they come across the  Constellation’s lone survivor, her captain, Commodore Decker (played brilliantly, I might add, by William Windom). Decker tells of what happened to his ship and crew, how they were attacked by an automated weapon of immense size and power. Just as Decker and Doctor McCoy beam back to the Enterprise, the “planet killer” reappears and attacks Enterprise.

With their Captains on board each other’s vessels, we now see played out how their competing strategies are enacted. Commodore Decker takes command of  Enterprise in order to continue with the strategy of “hitting it (the planet killer) with full phasers, at point-blank range!” Unfortunately, this is nothing more than a slight derivative of the strategy that ended up wrecking Constellation, and killing her crew, a fact that Enterprise’s first officer, Spock, points out. Spock also provides the reason that that strategy didn’t work – “The object’s hull is solid neutronium. There is no known way of blasting through it.” I would imagine not – neutronium is the almost incomprehensibly dense metal at the core of white dwarf stars, as they continue their path towards supernova and , eventually, black holes (how the creators of the planet killer extinguished the white dwarf star, mined and shaped its nuetronium into a funnel-like shape, and integrated its propulsion and defensive systems is not addressed). Decker’s strategy did not represent a very robust response the first time, and his modifications to that strategy won’t fare any better.

Kirk, on the other hand, accepts Spock’s analysis that his ship’s traditional weapons will be of no use in their current situation, and immediately abandons the strategy of attacking with those weapons. When Decker is relieved of command of Enterprise, he steals a shuttlecraft and commits suicide by flying it into the maw of the planet killer. Enterprise detects a minute reduction in the planet killer’s power emanations, and Kirk devises a new strategy. He will rig the Constellation’s impulse engines to detonate as she similarly flies into the planet killer’s interior. Naturally, there are some tense moments as Enterprise’s transporter system goes on and off-line, but, at the last possible moment, Kirk is beamed off of Constellation as she flies into the planet killer and detonates, permanently disabling the automated antagonist.

Note that Kirk had no pre-conceived strategy; or, if he did, he abandoned it immediately. He adapted to the situation, and developed a robust response to events as they unfolded. Conversely, Decker had a set strategy, and refused to significantly modify it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it didn’t work, and wouldn’t work in the future with nothing more than changing the range with which he confronted his foe. Don’t get me wrong – strategizing is great. But the truly insightful manager will be willing to abandon any strategy when the situation on-the-ground (or in deep space) calls for it.

And for those critics who might be tempted to assert that few real-life management situations are sufficiently similar to 50-year-old Star Trek episodes to provide insight, I have one question:

Are you really a Klingon infiltrator?