Strategy As A First Principle

The Path to Winning in the 21st Century

Perry C. Douglas

September 4, 2024

The concept of thinking from first principles comes from physics and encourages one to start bottom-up, directly at the level of established science and not make assumptions based on existing models or what you believe to be true. Aristotle phrased it as “the first basis from which a thing is known,” in pursuit of the objective truth. First principles thinking is a systematic approach to deconstructing problems to see them for what they truly are. It helps us to understand reality so that we can reshape it.

Many of us are always shouting about how we want a better future and often looking to politicians or other leaders to give them the life they want, instead of leading themselves. However, as many of us already know it is up to ‘us’ to build the life we desire most. No one is coming to save you, absolutely no one and believing otherwise is delusional.

Therefore, non-adherence or not learning very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us. We would be better off applying our intelligence sensibly and looking for those tools that can aid our desires. Technology and the times change but the underlying need to improve our lives for happiness is the ultimate pursuit of the human condition. However, happiness is not free nor is it a human right. Happiness is work and must be pursued. Therefore, the “pursuit of happiness” as Thomas Jefferson truly meant was “the pursuit of a meaningful life,” a life providing security as a basis for happiness. Therefore, the pursuit of happiness requires the pursuit of a strategy to achieve your goals and happiness objectives.

Beyond what we learned in school and what our parents and society have nurtured us in, the pursuit of happiness is a playing field unto itself and requires a playbook. Outperformance is necessary for both business and life, a next level to get to for realizing outperformance — a new dimensional sphere of thinking. This next level is called the applied intelligence domain, an informed and effective strategy development processing level that separates you from the herd.

Strategy is the common denominator for success whether in business or life. Strategy leads to the change you want but at the same time strategy too must be properly developed into a feasible vision to get you there. Without vision, strategy is just a fantasy. Therefore, strategy is objectively the first principle of success and is fundamental to growth!

The pace and magnitude of change today, only five years ago were probably unimaginable and are rocking the foundations of the global economy in the present. This transition to the digital age was accelerated years, accelerated by the 2020 pandemic. There was a necessity to adapt and adjust and humans have always been good at that. Therefore, continuing forward with this great acceleration requires a more applied new level of thinking and action — this is the applied intelligence, the ai way.

Success in the digital age requires access to information but information acquisition alone is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, information is critical to gaining an advantage but on the other hand, everyone relatively has access to the same information. Therefore, the battle is not about having access to information but more about what you do, and how you process that information that counts. Strategy development is paramount.

Managing change is critical to transformational change, but there must be a defined process framework to get good results. For organizations to transform effectively, everyone in the organization must be a leader within their sphere — the team becomes the foundation for organizational vision and leaders leadership.

The six-step process (6ai) outlines the organizational process to follow for transformational leadership, change, and performance. In a nutshell, the six-step (6ai) process is easy to use and guides users through an insight engine anchored in logic and human empathy. Underpinned by scientific wisdom. It’s a higher dimensional level of useful information retrieval from relevant and reliable sources that can be taken as empirically warrantable.

The first step is about developing a sensible vision because, without practicality for achieving growth ideas can easily go up in smoke. Therefore, applied intelligence step #1 (ai1) is about “Identifying the Right Strategic Problem to Solve.” This is the most important step, without accuracy to guide future decision-making the rest of the five steps can dissolve into a misleading exercise. The foundation must be sound and flexible for optimal results, so, the basis for this process is the ai maximum utility equation as represented in the image below.

The core function and objective of this equation is to find the objective truth about the ideas we pursue and utilize research methods to flesh out insights that can help us build effective growth strategies. By focusing on specific information relative to the topic or subject matter at hand our focused language models (FLMs) can achieve highly relevant knowledge acquisition customization. FLMs won’t suffer the same fate as LLMs; the noise, irrelevancy and hallucinations.

The learning-based insight generation is imperative to the six-step framework process, which first must determine what winning looks like to understand what to do to win. Further, 6ai helps you decide where to play and select the optimal winning playing field. It also breaks things down into the different mental or physical constructs that would create different ways to identify your winning playing fields.

Succeeding requires understanding how you will position your enterprise offering against other competitors on your playing field, i.e., do you offer a lower-cost alternative in a way that you can afford and make a profit with? Or do you seek to differentiate through a new and better offering? Or a combination of both? These are the types of relevant questions and answers the system will engage you in.

The Insight Engine helps you build capacity through analysis, building real value by capitalizing on discovery and reviewing decisioning through your customized system feedback loop. The ai process becomes your competitive advantage in a world full of information overload.

The system helps with setting the dimensions of learning specific to the topic, with specificity to find both the economic and strategic value alignments necessary to generate overriding value creation.

Ease of implementation analysis and inputs, i.e., data, algorithms, processes and systems, and required know-how, combined to decompose and assess use case findings along core dimensions of value and implementation efforts. Because context is everything! Information is best understood in context with all the other information around it. A single piece or piece of information without contextualization only produces ignorance. Our Insight Engine is also a contextualization processor, used to analyze any claim, fact or assertion, and identify any supporting evidence or any contradictions. Allowing the reader to better set criteria, and research optimization settings for optimal insight generation relative to setting priority ranking models for optimal decisioning.

Without a doubt, global economic and social forces drive the need to develop effective and informed strategies for change, whether it’s major organizational change, repositioning or repurposing the organization. Or personal change and realignment in a changing socioeconomic environment. It does not matter, what matters is setting strategy as a first principle methodology for growth!

Therefore, the maximum utility equation for an idea must include some basic real-world factors as a base, and build from the bottom up. These base factors can include the global technological environment, globalization, market complexity, developments, and tracking macro and micro trends. From these macros, find more focused and specific data points relevant to our strategy objectives and idea development. The process doubles as a risk management and mitigation tool and also protects against suffering from hallucinations, which LLMs are plagued with.

The strategy design system helps leaders build confidence in their leadership and ideas, by knowing they are working with real information in a well-defined and quantifiable process to find the objective truth. This creates a force that can break through various sources of organizational and societal inertia. Leaders now have a chance to remove the noise and focus on the objective truths about their ideas, to guide their strategic decision-making.

This is a reliable place of peace and clarity. Productive leadership requires leaders to grow through learning, quickly and accurately to understand and transform in complexity. Leadership and vision are fundamental to successful ideas. 6ai underpins that process so leaders and teams can move forward with confidence knowing they are backed with objective truths and not hallucinations.

Vision is essential for strategy because, without a vision, strategy can’t be built. This is why “Identifying the Right Strategic Problem to Solve.” Is the first step! We need clarity on the general direction of the change, transformation, or idea development itself. We need to inform and point the machine in the right direction to get to work the machine has to be properly trained. Clarity and purpose are unifiers and motivators, energizing teams to coordinate the necessary actions to move the process forward in a fast and efficient way.

Generally, people in organizations have different belief systems which leads to differing views on direction, so clarifying through evidence is useful. The ai process helps to bring clarity to confusion that team members may have, or may be wondering if change is even necessary.

Just spitting our cursory information without any context is useless, and creates more work for the users — verifying and fact-checking etc., and who needs that trouble. If you can’t trust your system then what good is it? You can use ChatGPT if you enjoy inaccuracies and aggravation.

For example, providing objective evidence of how the world is changing but the organization is not changing along with it, provides compelling reasons to make a change. With clarity, we can break through the inertia of indecision. Creating a shared sense of direction and purpose for sustainable growth organizations.

Ultimately, these organizations fail under the weight of their own ignorance and inaction. 6ai wants to help avoid that and also help people create value for organizations. 6ai is not a technology that seeks to replace humans but one that enhances human value.

What is also important is the strategic feasibility of the idea. Many organizations present lofty visions based on hubristic tendencies, coming from the C-suite. But these leaders don’t have a clue of even how to effectively approach 21st-century transformation or make it feasible. Effective strategy requires rigorous and robust processing of information and ideas, and in real-time, which is critical in shifting and dynamic environments. Transformational goals without a strategy development framework will lack credibility, and eventually, failure. Strategic feasibility also means that a vision not grounded in reality, without a clear and rational understanding of the real-world market environment and competitive trends, will be doomed. Regardless of what your high-priced but know-nothing consultant is spewing to you.

Therefore, strategy as a first principle provides both logic and detail to an idea, a vision makes sense and can work if the strategic steps to success are followed. In sum, the ai process enables visionary leadership, strategy development, and execution of transformational growth objectives.

The 21st century represents a digital climate that requires a new and intelligent toolbox for winning, 6ai offers such a toolbox. Unlike many of the usual suspects’ technologies that covertly seek to replace you, 6ai seeks to enhance both you and your enterprise’s worth. Our solution is geared toward performance and is far superior to the many different shades of grey technologies, being offered today. All of which are essentially doing the same thing.

We are fundamentally different because our philosophy is different and based on a balance of mathematics and philosophy, which go hand in hand. This simple foundation is optimal for authentic value creation — not to replace but to enhance. We believe in the power of people and given the right tools, ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.

Great ideas can’t happen with LLMs leading, they can only happen through true human leadership and vision. Our FLMs underwrite this process as an augmenting and empowerment tool for human progress, intertwined in scientific wisdom and not science fiction.

The key ingredient for sustained success in the 21st century is leadership! With a clear, practical, and executable vision for the future, but critically equally important are the tools we choose to work with, that can help us win.

We have to keep learning to keep winning, there can be no ambiguity about that — growth is a function of how well and how fast we learn. The most remarkable leaders have always been the ones who continuously develop their skills through lifelong learning. It is intellectually counterintuitive and lazy to believe that a single piece of technology, i.e., GenAI-based ChatGPT types can build a magic wand, and voila just like that you’re a winner. If it were that easy, we’d all be rich.

The world is not static it is active and new information for new ideas is generated daily, we need a framework to dampen the noise and where you can work through a process of logic.

Our rate of learning determines our rate of change, it’s simple math. And how much grow is a direct function of how well we learn and execute. We win because we out-learn and out-grow our rivals, and by developing our capacity to quickly understand complexity and how to handle it. This is the competitive capacity ai brings, which fuels our relentless drive to become producers of authentic value in the universe.

None of this requires any superior IQ, talent, or skills, or god forbid an MBA. All it requires is a disciplined commitment to learning while others go for the quick and easy, the more travelled and beaten path. 6ai is your partner, your learning differential, and that differential advantage to your nearest competitor is also your competitive edge!

There is no doubt that in the 21st century, the AI digital era brings new challenges we can’t even imagine today. Having a partner helping augment your learning without doubt will be a winning advantage in the AI era. 6ai provides the applied intelligence platform to bolster learning to build strategies for winning in the 21st-century.