While we could go over every point Dubik makes in order to develop a list of comparable principles that businesses could adopt, it would be best to read or listen to the words yourself. However, I would like to go over one particular topic that plays an important role in his concept of waging a Just War, and one that is of most concern to developing business plans or projects. And that is of his, “Unequal Dialogue.”

Remember when I mentioned that a dialogue must occur between both senior politicians and military leaders, but not necessarily on an equal footing? I was referring to Dubik’s “Unequal Dialogue.” It is unequal since objective civilian control of the military requires that civilian leadership has final decision authority when committing military forces to combat. It is a dialogue, since no one individual can know everything, and even geniuses make mistakes, so the subject matter experts on military operations need to have a strong voice in the conversation ongoing into a war, as well as how it is waged.

Dubik states, “The reality is that good war-waging decisions are most likely to merge from a set of political and military leaders bluntly and continuously arguing with one another in an attempt to identify strategy, policy, campaign, and organizational solutions to the complex and dynamic problems they face.”  This is in reference to an important section of Eliot Cohen’s book, Supreme Command, entitled “On Military Genius” in which organizations can’t rely on the capabilities of a few “geniuses” to be available to make every decision. They have to use the people they got with the knowledge and skills they have. Therefore, working through problems and developing courses of action amongst many subject matter experts is what is needed to generate adequate decisions and shape them. Peter Drucker would agree with this concept.

In Drucker book, Concept of the Corporation, he states, “No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings. No institution can endure if it is under one-man rule.” The premise for the discussion of “supermen” in all his writings primarily dealt with the issue of succession of the business after that superman had left; how would the company survive when it needs geniuses to run it? His solution is simply that the business would need processes that could be managed by regular people in leadership positions that generated adequate courses of action for the prosperity of the firm, under any market conditions. Our senior political and military leaders are those average human beings, though subject matter experts in their own right, that need to work together. Not to say that we don’t elect geniuses into our senior political offices or that the military doesn’t promote its supermen into its senior echelons, but only that our nation needs a process that doesn’t require that to be successful in war. The Unequal Dialogue is that process, or at least the one that Dubik would believe produces success.

There is more to glean from the Unequal Dialogue, such as the need for a secret, candid, and honest discussion of issues so that every perspective and option is on the table, and how to effectively engage in back and forth arguments needed to flesh them out into executable courses of action. There are also many other topics not covered in this review, that can be utilized by business owners, executives, and their managers in order to make their organizations more effective in moving forward and supervising operations. But we don’t want to take any more of the thunder out of the book.

Leaving it at that, James M. Dubik’s Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory is a worthwhile read for those in senior positions within a firm, company, business, joint venture, or partnership. You are in the position to guide a major endeavor, or at least manage an important aspect of one, and in doing so can see some of the same dilemmas that our nation’s senior leaders face when going to war, and overseeing its conduct. You are ensuring aims are established and worked towards. That the departments or elements of the business are unified in their efforts towards those aims. That you aren’t wasting the resources of the organization or wasting the time of your people in fruitless endeavors.  The veneer of warfare and business endeavors may look different, but that can be superficial. Fundamentally, waging and conducting a war is in many ways the same as engaging and supervising a business endeavor. You just need to know how to look at it. Just War Reconsidered would be a fine addition to your business waging library.