Conversation

I’ve been trying for years to to adapt the warfare “generations” model to management and I think I finally have the mapping right. The problem is that while both military and business are driven by tech, the business world is also driven by regulatory forces, muddying things
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If you make 2 assumptions, you get a roughly right and useful mapping: 1. Nth generation management generation tracks N-1th military generation 2. Shareholder value/agency theory ~1976 split the 3rd generation into 2 pieces, A and B that has no counterpart on military side
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The meaningful date boundaries are also slightly different. For example, it is most useful to mark the end of first generation warfare with the Mexican war of independence (1821) after which a;l major wars were second gen. But second gen management doesn’t really begin till ~1854
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There’s probably a way to topologically glue the 2 timelines together using Carlota Perez models. The transition between installation and deployment of a tech era has a new generation of warfare. The annoying muddying factor is that military evolution rate varies among branches.
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In particular, historically navy and army evolutionary paths have been out of phase by about a cycle. Navies tend to be half a generation ahead on doctrine but half a generation ahead on technology. This is because navies have historically been the highest-tech branch.
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(this explains the millennium war games/van riper episode outcome in 2000... NCW was a Navy idea, and is really 2nd gen warfare, which is why it got pwned by low-tech 3rd generation warfare which at the time was ~55 years old)
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I have to work this out more carefully, the phase-mismatch is not constant. During war in the at;antic (U-boats), navies briefly leaped forward to 3rd gen before backsliding to 2nd with Carrier era.
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A lot of my consulting shtick is basically a result of being simultaneously a lowkey war nerd and a lowkey management history nerd. I’m not as nerdy as full-blown devotees of either side, but I generally grok the historic interplay better than specialists on either side.
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