Operational Art

The book Operational Art is intended to provide both entrepreneur and business leaders with a tool that is based on the most modern military planning methodologies in order to assist them to effectively implement strategies and improve their business outcomes.

Military operations can be a huge undertaking of a political-economic-psychosocial-military nature, whose scope involves the entire nation. As a matter of fact, that type of undertaking is perhaps the one that applies all human knowledge from different fields and that has been developed by humankind throughout its existence. In addition, the art of war also exercises all types of human capacities while making use of disciplines ranging from physics, chemistry and mathematics to psychology, social sciences, and logistics. Therefore, we can say that there is no "enterprise" larger than an organization that conducts a complex "undertaking" like war (Armed Forces).

We know that many companies have attempted to ensure that the political vision and strategies defined by high management are translated by the executors into real and tangible actions. Much of what was thought and carefully planned gets lost on the way because of the lack of a methodological tool that would link the political and strategic levels (levels of vision for the company's direction) to the tactical level (execution level, production or "shop floor" level). This linkage should be done at the so called operational level, and the missing tool provided by the methodology of strategy operationalization, known as operational art.

Operational art is the cognitive and creative/emotional skill to develop a conceptual planning that should translate strategies into executable activities. In short, operational art is about implementing the strategies, that is, developing actions to put strategies into practice.

The conceptual planning, which is developed by means of operational art, is what should guide the different departments of the company to build their tactical action plans (detailed execution planning) to ensure the execution is entirely aligned with the company's strategies.