I: Why I Keep Writing About War and Work

The Mandatory Prelude to the Battlefield Series

Professionals never think of their work as a battlefield.
Many leaders don’t think of their initiatives as campaigns.
And almost nobody walks into a meeting room believing they are entering a theatre of organized struggle.

I have gained decades of experience in complex programmes, transformations, and enterprise-wide initiatives. Developed much knowledge, sharpened much of my skillset, gathered wisdom, and yet, I have learned one uncomfortable truth:

The corporate world resembles a battlefield far more than it resembles a tidy textbook.

Not because work is violent.
Not because leadership is combat.
But because the underlying forces that shape outcomes are the same:

uncertainty,
misalignment,
competing interests,
shifting terrain,
human will,
politics,
morale,
pressure,
opportunity,
and the constant contest between what we intend and what actually happens.

These are the mechanics of war.
They are also the mechanics of modern initiatives.

For years, I struggled to articulate why so many well-funded, well-planned initiatives faltered while others, often with fewer resources, created outsized impact.
The answer never lay in templates or methodologies.
It lay in how leaders understood the nature of the environment, the forces acting on their initiative, and the way decisions shaped momentum.

Eventually, I realised that classical war theory – especially the work of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu – explains these forces with greater precision than most management frameworks ever attempt.

Not because projects are war.
But because both domains involve:

purposeful action under pressure,
limited resources,
distributed teams,
risk,
ambiguity,
politics,
external shifts,
internal resistance,
and the need for someone to hold the whole campaign together.

When Clausewitz writes about friction, fog, moral forces, and culminating points, he is describing the realities that leaders of the initiatives face every day.
When Sun Tzu writes about positioning, timing, cohesion, and advantage, he is describing how leaders shape success long before execution begins.

These ideas are not poetry or imaginative romanticizing of the two diametrically opposite subjects.
It is about finding the structural parallels in them.

War theory gives us a precise and brutally honest language to describe forces that corporate vocabulary tends to soften or ignore.

It explains why good plans collapse at the first contact.

Why misalignment grows silently.
Why politics consumes energy.
Why culture becomes decisive.
Why teams either stand together or splinter under pressure.
Why momentum matters more than granularity.
Why leaders must concentrate effort at a few decisive points instead of spreading energy everywhere.

And most importantly:

It explains why leaders who think in terms of campaigns deliver different results than those who think in terms of tasks.

So, Why Do I Write about War and Work?

The stories of war and the battlefield, the bravery, courage, and determination of soldiers have been my childhood favorites. That gradually moved to how the leaders led and conducted campaigns on the battlefield. With that, their tactical moves became the stories. And then, when I began my professional journey, I slowly realized that strategy is not a PowerPoint slogan, alignment is not a workshop, and delivery is never linear.

Initiatives unfold through conflict, competition, probability, chance, and complexity. Their success remains rooted in corporate culture, human behaviour, and sheer human will.

They behave like campaigns.
And leaders who ignore the battlefield dynamics operating beneath their work lose advantage long before the first milestone slips.

This series exists for one purpose:
To give leaders a clear, honest, strategic lens for understanding why initiatives struggle, how they move, and what it takes to lead them as campaigns of value.

If you understand the battlefield, your decisions get sharper.
Your team gets calmer.
Your organisation becomes more resilient.
And your initiatives stop feeling like wildfires and start feeling like intentional manoeuvres.

So before we talk about misalignment, uncertainty, change, chaos, complexity, politics, morale, or momentum, let’s start here – with the reason behind it all.

I write about war and work because they share the same underlying geometry of competition, contest, and struggle.
And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.