The Poverty of Strategy: Organization in the Shadows of Technology

At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits behind grand generalities. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of distinctive settlement. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse rather than impose, organizational imperatives.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: strategy as the basic question of organization?; Part I. Authenticity: 1. Strategy and the organization of authenticity in the polis; 2. Can the strategoi ever build a polis?; 3. Strategy in the lifeworld, and the problem with home; Part II. The Three Epochs of Strategy: Technē, Technology, Technogenesis: 4. Technē – creating organizational forms from the earth; 5. Technology, machinery and giving over to the general in strategic practice; 6. Strategy as world picture; 7. Who or what is running strategy?; 8. The apparatus of Napoleon's forms of communication; 9. Strategy no longer thinks in terms of human beings; Part III. The Open: 10. Impoverished by strategy; 11. Reaching for open – strategy unbound.

About the Author :
Robin Holt is Professor of Strategy and Aesthetics and the University of Bristol Business School. He is the author of Judgment and Strategy (2018) and co-author of Strategy without Design, with Robert Chia (Cambridge, 2009). He was previously editor-in-chief of the journal Organization Studies. Mike Zundel is Professor in Organization Studies in the Strategy, International Business & Entrepreneurship Group, University of Liverpool Management School.

Review :
'This is a fascinating and important book, beautifully literate, very imaginative, stimulating, and challenging, especially for those under the illusion that 'strategy' is a straightforward term. The metaphor of the poverty of strategy, which essentially turns poverty on its head, is brilliant. For anyone who wants to see paradox enacted in practice, here is the place to look. This book is a gift to us all.' Jean M. Bartunek, Professor of Management and Organization, Boston College 'Combining Nietzschean gaiety with the political sobriety of Hannah Arendt, The Poverty of Strategy rewrites the theory of organisational strategy as an open-ended response to Alan Turing's implied question: Who am I? From the ruins of the ancient polis to artificial intelligence, Holt and Zundel deftly turn managerial reason inside out to discover irreverent, unfixed life lurking in the shadows of modernity's most hermetic machines.' Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University