A good survey of the history of strategy, but one that may leave the reader more confused than enlightened because the term has been used in so many slippery ways.

The last chapter is insightful and useful, but the history is in a matter of reality, haphazard and confused, and as such hard to really remember and take onboard. ( )

Abandoned about 1/3 through. Tremendously boring and lacking in much insight. ( )

Extremely short on details because it covers a ridiculously broad range of time and topics. It's really well written, without pointless flourishes - it keeps you interested by writing about interesting things. Not sure it's about strategy but there's certainly a lot of history in it and I enjoyed it for that. The business chapters were the weakest but still worth it. ( )

March 20th, nearing the end of Part II:

Rather disappointing so far. I think my problem is that it's caught at a no-man's-land level of abstraction. It's not concrete enough to be engaging at the 'human' level, or as a series of interlinked narratives. But neither is it up at that clean level of abstraction where everything seems to make logical sense, and you get a satisfying feeling of high-level insight. And it's far too long-winded to be an enjoyably breezy overview. I'm reminded of a lot of boring writing on philosophy: the kind where the author tells you that Plato thought this, and Aristotle thought that, and so on and so on, never giving enough detail for you to genuinely understand the ideas, but somehow going on at great length and with an air of authority. ('Magisterial' indeed, /The Economist/!)

Sentence-by-sentence the writing is fine, but structurally it seems fairly aimless, and as I said above it's hardly compelling. I'll continue anyway, partly because of the sunk-cost fallacy and my completionist tendency, but also because (despite my whinging above) it's not /that/ bad, and I've heard that the final 200 pages or so are more interesting than the first 400. Also I have the audiobook, so when reading feels like a chore I can listen instead.

Caveats: so far the main focus has been military strategy, on which I have no prior knowledge and no particular interest. Also, at times when I've been listening rather than reading, I've been less attentive than usual, accepting that some bits are going to go over my head while I'm distracted by my own thoughts. I blame the book for that -- if it were less tedious I'd be more inclined to focus -- but it does mean my complaints might not be entirely fair.

March 27th: Part 3 is proving a bit more interesting so far -- maybe because it has some more compelling narrative threads, maybe because 20th-century politics feels more real to me than abstract discussion of military strategy. This still doesn't seem like a very focused or coherent history of strategy, though.

April 2nd: Having finished the book, I haven't really changed my opinion. The section on business strategy suffered from similar flaws as the section on military strategy, and the final section seemed rather perfunctory. It also contained a small but strange error, which made me wonder about the author's credibility on other topics:

"One researcher suggested that the “experience of taking a course in microeconomics actually altered students’ conceptions of the appropriateness of acting in a self-interested manner, not merely their definition of self-interest.” In studies of traders in financial markets, it transpired that while the inexperienced might be influenced by Thaler’s “endowment effect,” for example, the experienced were not. This might not be flattering to economists, but it did show that egotistical behavior could also be quite natural."

Overall I don't recommend this. It contains a few interesting or thought-provoking nuggets, but is largely a not-particularly-coherent grab-bag of other people's ideas, covered at enough length to be tedious but in insufficient depth to be enlightening. If the book has one big point to make, I think it's something to do with the hubris and naivety of overly rationalistic (and optimistic) attempts to turn strategy into a precise science & to rely on it to solve complex and fluid problems. I can readily believe that, but I don't think the case was made clearly or coherently or comprehensively enough to convince someone inclined to believe the opposite.

(The audiobook also has its flaws -- my opinion on the narrator's voice and style isn't really relevant, but he makes quite a few errors, including some that suggest neither he nor whoever signed off on the finished product were following the meaning of what he was saying.) ( )