Much of strategy centers on deep thinking and viewing the situation from a lofty perspective. However, when it's time to execute it's often necessary to get out of the proverbial ivory tower and get your hands dirty. As Sun Tzu's Art of War states, "Those who do not know the conditions of mountains and forests, hazardous defiles, marshes and swamps, cannot conduct the march of an army."
This was brought home to me as a young infantry officer. We were setting up a defensive position and in the process of finding the proper location for the unit's machine gun team. Siting a machine gun properly is critical to building a solid defense, since machine guns are often the most potent weapon an infantry unit has available.
Standing there I thought I'd found the exact right place for the machine gun team. From where I stood there was a good field of fire and the position looked solid. At that moment the machine gunner asked me to get down on the ground and look from the vantage point he would have when firing. Once I lay down on the ground it was obvious this was the wrong place. The gunner's view and field of fire were blocked by clumps of ground and grass that were not noticeable when standing. So we had to move it and find a better place for the weapon. You can bet that this time I got down on the ground to check things out before making the final decision.
Not "getting down on the ground" was one of the reasons for the dot.com bust. Many dot.com leaders failed to ensure that their business models and plans were workable in reality. Instead the focus was on selling a business plan, getting funding, selling off the business and then setting up another business. Many entrepreneurs were uninterested in the nuts & bolts of running a real business. I recall one meeting I had with some MBA students at a very prestigious university. They were presenting us (managers in a large division in a Fortune 100 company) an idea for a web service, hoping we would invest. Talking to one of them during a break I found out that this person, in addition to getting their MBA at this very competitive school and working on this start-up, was also involved in four other start-up efforts. In the end none of them panned out.
The lesson is clear; strategies, tactics and ideas that appear winners when viewed from above need to be checked out at ground level before implementing. Otherwise, the result can be disaster. As the British spy novelist John le Carre put it, "A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."
