Beating Clausewitz

General Von Clausewitz was a German (Prussian to be more exact) Military thinker. He roamed this planet somewhere in the early 1800s, fought a few wars and then went on to write a book "On War" - a treatise on military strategy and warfare. He was considered one of the best strategists of all time and his ideas and theories debated and revered. Now in the late 1990s people realised that business was also similiar to war if not worse and decided to apply his ideas to corporate warfare.

The result - it became part of MBA course work in 2002 and our first test as fresh MBA students.

Normally the first few days of class are relaxed. You would have introduced yourself umpteen times to your classmates and listened to them as well as they talk about their hobbies and why they joined MBA.

But then in came our Strategy professor and scared the hell out of us.

For starters he said being on time is late, being ten minutes early is on time and he would be in class ten minutes before and shut the door. He gave two hoots to using the Queen's english and peppered his lectures with the choicest abuses - the majority of which were directed at the hapless Strategy managers of multi national corporations.

"Do you buggers know Clausewitz?" he thundered at us. Obviously we were clueless and looked uncomfortably at each other. "You buggers are useless, do a book review of Clausewitz on strategy. It should be on A4 sheets Times New Roman font, size 14 and single line spacing and submit it by next week" and with that he stormed out.

It took us two full minutes to recover.

The next few days passed peacefully. Other classes - introductions, interests, hobbies. Life was peaceful and we forgot Clausewitz and his strategies till one of our more studious classmates rushed in one day announcing that this Clausewitz book was some 500 odd pages and looked big enough to be used for a pillow.

A collective gasp went up.

Just a few more days to go before he would come again and abuse us all. Wait. THere was more bad news. There was only one copy in the whole of our library (our library had the distinction of being one of the biggest B school libraries in Mumbai - thanks to our strat professor again). Well more bad news. That one copy was in the reference section - that meant it cannot be taken out.

It took only a split second for all us future managers to take that single selfish decision - Be the first to get the book!There was a mass stampede towards the library. The librarian must have had so many students inside the library for the first time in her long career.

Two days later..

In walked our professor ten minutes early. We learnt fast. We were all in before him. He looked at all of us. "I must say you blokes are all pretty decent. Some pretty good reviews and all of you had done it quite well really." He was clearly surprised.

Little did he know how we put one over him and over our dear General Von Clausewitz.

One day earlier....

The year 2002, internet in India was in its infancy. Our computer lab had about 60 odd computers for over 200 students and the internet was mainly used for email so the lab was never crowded. But this day it was crowded by the students from the illustrious batch of 2002.

Sites visited - amazon, firstandsecond, oxfordbookstore;

key words searched - reviews on "Clausewitz on Strategy".

Beautifully edited so that no one, not even the original review writers could make out we had plagiarised their words we set it to Times New Roman, size 14, single line spacing and dutifully submitted the same just before the deadline.