More military battles are lost by stupidity than won by genius.
Too many business gurus focus on the secret techniques for winning instead of showing the proven path to failure. Instead of promising clever tactics and lessons — which, if they were actually effective would be employed by everyone and therefore no longer be clever — books and gurus would be better if they focused on all the tactics, strategies, and decisions that went terribly wrong. I talked about some of my failures and poor decisions in my own book, but could have done more.
This idea is similar to a post I did on an Arnold Kling quote which said the most important knowledge in business is the stuff that ought to work, but doesn’t.
(Hat tip to Eliezer Yudkowsky for fueling pretty much this whole post including the first sentence.)
you should read about a military strategist named John Boyd. There have been books written about how his theories apply to business such as Chet Richards’ Certain to Win. There’s a website for him out there. He’s a really interesting guy with ideas about how to win military campaigns.