The Poverty of Strategy: Organization in the Shadows of Technology

By: Robin Holt and Mike Zundel

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Synopsis: At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct 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 a partial view, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits. 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 efficient predictability. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse the imperatives being generated by machine relations.