‘AI Technologies and the Future of Management’ Workshop, University of Liverpool, Thursday, 21 September 2023
Thank you to Robin and Mike for inviting me to speak today.
In these opening remarks, I’ll offer a synopsis of Robin and Mike’s book The Poverty of Strategy and take up their invitation to defend the practical value of philosophy in business. I’ll sketch four recent conversations sparked by the book and pose some questions—both to the authors and to practitioners.
The Book
This is a big book—one that draws on an extraordinary range of philosophical, literary, artistic, and musical examples to interrogate what we, as strategists, are actually doing when we “do strategy.” It invites us to hold a mirror to ourselves and ask: Do we even know what we are doing anymore? The unsettling answer it offers is: not really. In a digital world that shapes us before we’re even aware of it, we strategists may have sleepwalked into our own obsolescence. To remain relevant, we must wake up, slip through a narrow opening into a new role, and, frankly, change our lives.
The book unfolds in three parts. Part I laments the impoverishment of the strategic life and gestures toward the possibility of an authentic strategist. Part II traces how this condition came to be.
Part I: Introducing the Strategist, or We Don’t Know What We’re Doing
Chapter 1 introduces language not as a tool for smooth coordinating, but as something that unsettles and disorients. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between labour, work, and action, Robin and Mike champion a strategist who takes action, rather than one who merely copes or produces. This strategist asks open-ended questions such as “What if?” and “So what?”—and sees differently. They use language to disrupt the complacent fluency of the smooth operator.
Chapter 2 introduces the strategist as the uncanny one, the one who is never quite at home, always sensing the organisation could be otherwise. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben, Robin and Mike sketch a strategy of bare life, a “whatever strategy” of estrangement and openness. Here they level a quiet but devastating critique of promise-based strategy, an approach I’ve been immersed in for 25 years. They argue that attempts to cordon off strategic space from the untrained or self-interested can paradoxically suffocate organisations, turning strategy into self-serving sophistry.
In Chapter 3, they conclude Part I by portraying the strategist, as the exemplary contemporary human, the questioning creature who has forgotten how to ask questions. Drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger, they suggest that it is through de-attunement and estrangement from prevailing distinctions and means-ends thinking that the strategist’s true path opens up. But as strategists have increasingly aligned organisations with fixed missions, they have killed off that very questioning. Their final image is of Nietzsche’s last men, blinking indifferently at the latest atrocity, poor in world but happy.
Part III: The Path into Technogenesis
Part II traces how this condition came to be, through four ages of strategy. From the Greeks’ poïesis—making in partnership with contingency—we moved through the mechanistic control of the Middle Ages into the technological mode of “challenging forth,” as Heidegger describes it. Nature becomes a standing reserve—something to be extracted, optimised, calculated.
Calculation ultimately replaces other forms of thinking: meditative, mindful, sober. Through an eye-opening critique of Alfred Sloan’s tenure at GM and a turn to Arendt, Robin and Mike paint a picture of human agency dissolving into automatic functioning. The human, they suggest, has become part of the machinery.
Finally, in the age of digital technology, reality itself is no longer merely mediated by technology—it is technology. Strategy becomes just another operation in a digital world of endless recombination, repetition with trivial difference—a stillborn natality. Here, we find ourselves in technogenesis, a state in which we are tranquilised by systems of our own making. We no longer know what we are doing. Even the engineers are simply installing modules and following black-box procedures.
At this point, the human has forgotten how to ask questions.
Part III: What Is Left for the Strategist?
What, then, is left for the proud strategist? Robin and Mike do not deny that strategy persists—but it persists in a happy nihilism. Strategy today is not meaningless in the sense of being unpleasant, it is simply comfortably impoverished. The strategist is fitted perfectly to the world of technogenesis and, thus, has forgotten to question it.
Their solution? It is, albeit in their own words “not much of a way out,” is a gesture toward a hopeful figure: the daimon. Daimons, lesser gods or spirit guides, were present in Homeric Greece, persisted through the Renaissance (think da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine), and live on in contemporary literature like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Robin and Mike reconceive the strategist as a particular daimon, most like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who helps others see that home is something we create along the way—imperfect, uncertain, cracked open, but alive. The daimon is not a manager of outcomes but a questioner of givens, an agent of difference, a whisperer of “is it really so?” They attend to cracks, glitches, and residues that escape technological assimilation.
Their final image is striking: Dorothy discovers that both Kansas and Oz are illusions but goes on to see that the world is cracked all the way through—and that it is from those cracks that new life might seep.
That is the role of the contemporary strategist: the daimon of the glitches.
What Can the Strategist Do?
Thank you, Robin and Mike, for this generous, challenging, and deeply rewarding book. It’s been a privilege to engage with it—and I urge everyone here to read it. Let me offer four conversations I’ve had in the last few weeks, each informed by this book, that speak to the practical relevance of philosophy to contemporary strategists and leaders.
1. Language as Resistance
In a workshop with a global tech company, we explored the organisation’s dominant language—a simplified language of productivity, efficiency, and speed. When we introduced more poetic, resonant, “realer” language—language that gave voice to silences and mysteries and named longings for meaning and connection—it drew powerful resistance. Yet that resistance itself was revealing. Complexifying a dominant language is a form of enlivening. It enables us to distinguish and name glitches and cracks, and combats the impoverishing effects of linguicide, which levels all differences that might make a difference and diminishes our ability to do subtle work.
2. The Poetic Readiness of Executives
In another conversation with senior consultants—one working with top political and business leaders in the Middle East, the other with investment bankers in the UK—we explored how executives respond to poetic language. The former found her clients more open to language that resonates with heritage and tradition. The latter struggled to generate such depth. Robin and Mike’s emphasis on language speaks directly to this: what kinds of linguistic worlds are still possible?
3. Human vs. Machine Creativity
In my conversation with Harvard philosopher Sean Dorrance Kelly, he argued that genuine human dignity lies in the creative ability to reshape norms in important human domains—something AI cannot do. If we allow ourselves to emulate machines, we risk losing our human dignity. I don’t believe things have gone quite so far. I believe we can still help leaders tap into this norm-transforming creativity. I suspect mood opens a door to this creativity.
4. The Daimonic Mood-Shifter
I endorse Robin and Mike’s daimonic role for the strategist. For me, the daimon is the one who inflects mood—away from technological detachment and toward attunement with anomalies and glitches. Consulting, at its best, is daimonic mood work. In my consulting practice, I live every day in the limited range of permissible moods of contemporary business. Positivity reigns. Resilience, bounciness, busy-ness, excitement, and the entrepreneurial spirit are demanded. Negativity and the “mood-hoovers” of resentment, anxiety, boredom, envy, anger, resignation or fear scrupulously avoided. Is it this simple? I’d love to hear more from Robin and Mike about how they envision these new daimons in practice.