Real Strategy

Resources in Strategy; Lye Brook Wilderness

Bill Carson — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:20:20 +0000

BOURN POND Its nice sitting in this tree. The sun has broken through intermittent clouds, switching on the brilliant leaves of my red maple. This is no ordinary tree. It’s a cage. The main trunk is normal for the first two or three feet. Then it splits into 5 sub-trunks that start horizontally for a couple of feet, then go straight up, creating a cage. Once inside it, your visual field is saturated red leaves. Gorgeous. The tree is on the shore of Bourn Pond in the Lye Brook Wilderness in southern Vermont; it’s the only place I’ve seen trees … Continue reading →

Negotiating Strategy; Buying on the Silk Road

Bill Carson — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:34:43 +0000

SITTING here with family and friends on a large wooden divan in a Samarkand chaikhana, sipping that good tea, and eating some local snacks … we were about to take in some of the city’s magnificent architecture. Tomorrow we would be going to the Registan, a great market where I could take a shot at doing some negotiating with Silk Road merchants renowned for their sophisticated bargaining. The Silk Road Built on even much earlier trade routes, the Silk Road was a well-established overland route by 200 BC, that primarily connected the Mediterranean and China. No surprise, a principal commodity of trade … Continue reading →

Strategy Types: Critical Operations

Bill Carson — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:39:14 +0000

LET’S take a quick look at some compelling strategy situations … 1. SURVIVAL By a near miracle, or perhaps an actual miracle, you’ve just survived a night time airplane crash somewhere in the Amazon. The Amazon is a big place and you don’t know where you are. It’s also a formidable place, night or day. You probably wouldn’t last more than several days in this environment before perishing, so you have to quickly make your way to safety. You sense that your chances of finding a village are poor and that perhaps you should try to arrange, instead, for someone else to … Continue reading →

Strategy in the News: Lasso and Lascaux

Bill Carson — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:06:16 +0000

LASSO Well-regarded author Patricia O’Brien had produced 5 novels. But her last one hadn’t sold well, and her Simon & Shuster editor declined to publish her new one, “The Dressmaker”. A dozen more publishers also rejected the efforts of her well-known literary agent, Esther Newberg, to secure a contract for the book. What was going on? Turns out O’Brien’s book was being rejected because her numbers had been lowered in Nielsen BookScan, a book sales tracking service, as a result of the performance of her most recent book. And the publishing house editors were making their publishing decisions based on … Continue reading →

The Gray Area

Bill Carson — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 22:45:12 +0000

Mt. Sopris The scene below is of Mount Sopris, a prominent feature of the Maroon Bells – Snowmass Wilderness in western Colorado. We’re here, you and I, because we’re doing a little reconnaissance for a flight in an altitude-limited light plane that will take us past that peak tomorrow morning. It’s a gorgeous day and getting here was an easy hike. We find ourselves in a benign, rather soft and idyllic scene: green, rolling hills, open woodlands; it’s sunny and the warm air has amped up the smell of the pines. We’re sitting here, taking in the mountain, brilliant in … Continue reading →

Found Strategies; Busacco

Bill Carson — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 20:00:33 +0000

PALACE HOTEL AT BUSACCO My wife, Barbara, and I were driving around Portugal on a route created by putting red dots on a road map at locations of interesting wineries, and then connecting them via various other places of interest. Our friend Tim had bootstrapped this process with some helpful maps and suggestions, from his travels there. When we drove into sight of the great old Palace Hotel do Bucaco (alternatively spelled and pronounced Busacco and Bussaco), we knew we were doing something right. This fabulous old building, with its lavish Manueline architecture, was once a hunting lodge for Portuguese … Continue reading →

The Winds of Patagonia; Cooperative Strategy

Bill Carson — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:30:30 +0000

Down the E. Coast of Patagonia My friend Marcelo organized a car trip through Patagonia. As a young guy he had worked on a Patagonian estancia and knew the territory well. The plan was to start in Buenos Aires, drive down the east side of Argentina through the Pampas, along the Atlantic Coast of Patagonia, cross the Strait of Magellan, spend Christmas week with friends in Ushuaia on the island of Tierra Del Fuego, then re-cross the Strait, head west, drive back north along the Andes Cordillera, and then east again to Buenos Aires. 6000 miles. We would be stopping … Continue reading →

Strategy in the News: Fake Review Scams

Bill Carson — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:02:51 +0000

RISKY RELIANCE Here we are online, looking for a pair of sneakers. We’re at the site of a major online retailer. [sorry - ignore this interruption: BYB6NREXZYJG] So many sneakers to choose from. A dazzling array of makes, models and colors. How to choose? After going down the search tree, we find several candidates that look pretty good. Time to check out their customer reviews. Wow – so many 5-star customer ratings! Funny. As we read along, some reviews emerge as rather odd. Maybe it’s the way the reviewer slipped into “marketing speak” – which we wouldn’t expect a real consumer … Continue reading →

Escaping E. Berlin; A Simple Way to Devise Complex Strategies (1)

Bill Carson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:54:21 +0000

COLD WAR CHILLS The Wall came down in 1989. Over 20 years ago. It’s easy to forget what it was like for the people living on both sides of it at the time. NATO had a very important role during the time of The Wall, and Germany and America were especially close partners. Did you know that Germany had Air Force facilities in the U.S. (and still does)? During the later part of the Cold War, I had business with the German Air Force, and flew out of a tightly guarded German facility at Dulles Int’l. Airport. High cyclone fences … Continue reading →

Escaping E. Berlin; A Simple Way to Devise Complex Strategies (2)

Bill Carson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:53:51 +0000

FOLLOW-UP to the previous post: here are some specifics on how to devise complex strategies. In that post we were using the example of Achim Weyer’s escape from E. Berlin. Weyer had decided to escape by armoring a car and making it through a checkpoint (gate location) in The Wall. If we were to devise a complex strategy along the line of Weyer’s, we would go through a process of sketching two kinds of diagram. This gets the key points of our strategy down on paper, and in the process, into our heads. The Objectives Diagram First, we’d identify the objective(s) (in this … Continue reading →