Against Best Practices

  > No army has ever conquered a country

Napoleon and his army would like to have a word with you…

I get the analogy but I think it can be made a lot better, which will decrease people who dismiss it because they got lost in where the wording doesn’t make sense. I’m pretty confident most would agree that country A conquered country B if country B was nothing but fire and rubble. It’s pretty common usage actually. Also, there’s plenty of examples of countries ruled by militaries. Even the US president is the head of the military. As for army, it’s fairly synonymous with military, only really diverting in recent usage.

Besides that, the Army Corp of engineers is well known to build bridges, roads, housing, and all sorts of things. But on the topic of corp, that’s part of the hierarchy. For yours a battalion, regiment, company, or platoon may work much better. A platoon or squad might take control of a building. A company might control a hill or river. But it takes a whole army to conquer a country because it is all these groups working together, even if often disconnected and not in unison, even with infighting and internal conflicts, they rally around the same end goals.

By I’m also not sure this fully aligns with what you say. It’s true that the naive only talk at abstract levels, but it’s common for experts too. But experts almost always leak specifics in because the abstraction is derived from a nuanced understanding. But we need to talk in both abstractions and in details. The necessity for abstraction only grows, but so does the whole pie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_organization

The US president, a civilian, is in command of the US military. This is, in fact, the inverse of a country being run by its military.

Also true in the UK. Even in a war the UK armed forces are ultimately tasked by and report to politicians.

Its true everywhere except for military dictatorships.

> I’m pretty confident most would agree that country A conquered country B if country B was nothing but fire and rubble.

I think we can all agree that if that is the case, you’ve in fact conquered nothing.

Edit: Since we say opposite things, maybe we wouldn’t agree.

It's a cute analogy, but like all analogies it breaks after inspection. One might try and salvage it by observing that military "best practice" in the field and Best Practice at HQ need not be, and commonly are not, the same, either for reasons of scope or expediency. Moreover, lower case "practice" tends to win more, more quickly. Eg guerillas tend to win battles quickly against hidebound formal armies.

For a startup, winning "battles, not wars," is what you need, because you have finite resources and have an exit in mind before you burn through them. For a large enterprise, "winning wars not battles" is important because you have big targets on your back (regulators, stock market, litigation).

One might paraphrase the whole shooting match with the ever-pithy statement that premature optimization is the root of all evil.

So.. how would you make it a lot better?

  >> Also, there’s plenty of examples of countries ruled by militaries. Even the US president is the head of the military

Maybe I should have reversed the order of these two. I didn't intend to use the US as an example of a country ruled by a military but rather that military is integral and connected directly to the top.