Ruses de Guerre

As regular readers know, I’m fascinated with the problem in open innovation of sharing intentions.  Inventions – those we can share.  Patents, NDAs – all about sharing ‘intellectual property’ mainly in the form of inventions.

But believing that sharing inventions is sufficient for innovation is like thinking that you can make proper sentences using only nouns.

The trouble with sharing intentions is that they are slippery, and you can’t protect them. Once people know what you intend to do, they can capture the opportunity for themselves or thwart your plans with impunity.

Recently, I was reading David Ignatius’s Body of Lies, and he quotes Lord Ismay (1953):

To mystify and mislead the enemy has always been one of the cardinal principles of war.  Consequently, ruses de guerre have played a part in almost every campaign since the Trojan Horse.  The game has been played for so long that it is not easy to think out new methods of disguising one’s strengths or one’s intentions.

Business-as-warfare is such a dominant notion that perhaps it is no wonder we have many ways to conceal our intentions but few ways to share them; many ways to mislead others, but few mature ways to work together across company lines.

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