A booby-trapped management lesson: What managers can learn from revolutionaries

Caption: The key to the Viet Cong success was the fact that it never lost sight of its core purpose and kept adapting its means to strive towards the same. Photo: Collected

The Viet Cong was an armed communist revolutionary organisation that fought and, after a long-drawn struggle, emerged victorious against the US-backed South Vietnamese government in the Vietnam War, famously dealing the far superiorly-equipped United States military its most humbling defeat. 

While the outfit was created by the North Vietnam government and supported by the Soviet Union and China, it was essentially a Third-World guerilla force with limited resources. The key to the Viet Cong's success was improvisation – opportunistically using everything available in its environment, from bamboo to snakes, as strategic weaponry.

Among other types of snares and traps, the Viet Cong made explosive booby traps, which were essentially weak, improvised versions of anti-personnel landmines. Interestingly, Viet Cong's usual practice was to intentionally use significantly lower amounts of explosives in their charges than the quantity required to kill an average person.

You might be wondering why a vicious and brutally resource-efficient militant group would not wish to deal lethal blows to its targets. Why did the Viet Cong deliberately build inadequately-loaded explosive devices?

The answer to that question is underpinned by a principle vital for managers – 'Focus'. Management is the art of utilising limited resources to optimise value creation. A manager can't do everything, at least all at once. It is foolhardy to even hope for the same. The very scope of a manager and that of the discipline of management lies in the finitude of resources. The paucity of opportunities underpins the very requirement of a manager to reorganise the available resources and means so as to best utilise them to meet the set objectives. 

Managerial roles are derived from the organisation's need for optimisation under constraints. That's where focus comes in. The best manager knows to get everything done enough rather than try to do everything to the fullest and fall short on all fronts. Getting various parameters to their respective levels of adequacy so as to maximise value is essential for a business leader. It is thus of utmost importance to have some degree of prioritisation among goals in order to sustain them in practice. Emphasising everything is emphasising nothing – such emphasis is self-defeating.

It's easy to focus on mistaking a means for the end, focusing on the path instead of the destination. Sticking to the objective instrument instead of the more abstract purpose it serves is a common reason for the downfall of ventures big and small. 

So what does all this have to do with Viet Cong's booby traps?

Viet Cong's insidious lesson in focus

The Viet Cong's primary objective was to overthrow the South Vietnamese government and anything and everything it did served as mere means toward this end. Being an insurgent guerilla force, Viet Cong knew it couldn't take down the S. Vietnam govt and the US in direct open confrontations. 

It thus chose a long-term approach – a veritable policy of a thousand cuts. The militant group was akin to a band of nimble rats on their terrain, opportunistically delivering bites to its titanic enemies, opening small festering wounds, and ultimately bleeding the slow, clumsy giants to death. 

If individual casualties were the wounds it inflicted, dissent was the suppuration that the Viet Cong wished to fester in them. They realised that the best way to bring down the towering edifice of the government was to incite discontent towards it and knew this would take longer.

By deliberately moderating the quantity of explosive material loaded in its mine and creating other improvised non-lethal snares and traps, Viet Cong ensured that its devices would maim, not kill. Corpses are not tended to, but the critically injured are. One incapacitated civilian meant a reduction of the workforce without an accompanying reduction of a consumer. 

In fact, mutilated individuals would obviously need more attention, care and support throughout their everyday life. This meant that the casualties of its underloaded armaments, who would likely be survivors rather than fatalities, would go on to become economic liabilities to their respective families. 

Each layperson who would be physically debilitated by the trap would need to be fed, constantly attended to, and cared for by their kith and kin, consuming economic resources and above-average human hours of effort without being able to contribute much of it. The dead are abandoned, and the near-dead aren't. 

These casualties would accumulate gradually but steadily, and the liabilities of hundreds of thousands of such individuals would add up to the burden and overwhelm the country's economy, creating widespread discontent among the already-troubled populace who would blame the government for the economic inefficiency and welfare failings. 

This doesn't mean that the Viet Cong didn't kill – its actions directly or indirectly resulted in thousands of deaths of ordinary Vietnamese, in addition to those from its enemy forces. It is just killing more and more people, esp. Vietnamese civilians were not the goal of the force but one of many means deployed as and when necessary. 

The aim was to topple the incumbent regime of S. Vietnam and crippling citizens en masse would serve that goal better on many occasions than simply massacring them. 

Designing traps intended to maim rather than kill would create dependents resulting in economic hardship for their respective families, which would, in turn, amass to strain the land's overall economy, inhibiting development and welfare, thus generating dissent, resentment, and reprimand towards the ruling government, finally facilitating its deposition. 

Photo: Collected

Despite the overwhelming length of the causal chain leading up to it, Viet Cong remained fixated upon its ultimate goal of overthrowing the incumbent regime, never once losing sight of or wavering from it.

Thus, instead of putting its efforts in using its limited material, labour, and time resources towards stuffing the requisite amount of gunpowder into, say, 50 lethal landmines, it would redistribute the same resources towards making, say, 200 non-lethal yet incapacitating mines of a quarter of the potency, maximising its targeted effect and rendering optimal utilisation of all resources. 

Many of the unassuming, minimalist, pernicious traps that the Viet Cong used when attacking American troops were based on similar tactics. Many contained just enough explosive to blow off a soldier's toes or foot causing excessive bleeding and slowing the advance of the entire team down by having to tend to him and carry him along with them. 

Another of its mine traps contained two charges – a primary explosive that would go off when made contact with or triggered by a tripwire and a secondary trick explosive that would go off after the first one, intended to injure comrades of the potential victim who would at once rush to his aid upon the first explosion. Injuries and incapacitation also had an adverse mental effect, breaking the morale of the US forces to continue marching on and question their own leadership. 

Sure enough, such vexing attacks led to a number of American soldiers feeling a sense of purposelessness in various campaigns, defying orders, and at times turning on their own commanders. The Viet Cong's goal was to try to kill as many American soldiers as possible, which would have proven foolhardy and likely led to a delayed but decisive American victory. Its goal was to hold the American troops back at critical moments – delay them long enough to be unable to lend their ally South Vietnam a strategic advantage and impede them enough to break their morale. 

Hence, instead of focusing its limited resources on creating some decisively-lethal units, it redistributed the same quota into creating many more non-lethal disruptive units. These measures helped it conserve resources and inventory, operate with greater flexibility, adapt to changes better, and ultimately force a war-weary America to withdraw from the country.  

An instructive parallel in nature would be why snake venom, despite happening to be lethal to humans in many species, isn't deployed by snakes on humans without provocation. The purpose of a snake's deadly venom is to immobilise its prey quickly to make it easy to track, catch, and swallow. As even a small rodent like a mouse could inflict severe damage to its limbless predator when it is being swallowed alive, the potent chemical implement complements the reptile's lack of biomechanical dexterity and mangling and chewing apparatus. 

In some cases, the venom also initiates external digestion of the prey. Now, an immobilising agent would almost always prove lethal in enough dosage and thus also prove to be a killing agent. But that doesn't change the strategy that is most effectively deployed by a predator. Hence, it's no wonder why a snake would willingly waste its hard-built and dearly-stocked concoction of concentrated complex proteins on a victim which it cannot consume. Almost all snake-bites are thus a defensive offence.

Viet Cong's long-term strategy of opening gases in the government's credibility through economic destabilisation reflected its clarity of purpose and its unwavering commitment to its goal. Their robust foresight is evident in the winding causal sequence of phenomena that it strategically set in motion, all the way from attenuating its mines to usurping control of the country via riddling the economy with unemployment, deftly leveraging micro-incidences to precipitate macro-effects.

The key to the militant outfit's success was the fact that it never lost sight of its core purpose and kept adapting its means to strive towards the same. Its fixation on its precisely-defined goal ensured that all its resources were utilised to maximal efficacy vis-a-vis its vastly better-equipped and resourced opponent, whose disoriented members on the ground had no clearly-defined, consistent reason for coherently directing their actions or sustaining their morale.

Businesses can take a lesson from this historical parable to always be mindful of where their focus lies, knowing the reasonable, practical limits of their capabilities and efforts, and directing them in a utilitarian manner to best achieve their desired end goal. The vital first step is to define one's vision rigorously and unambiguously. Once a core goal is identified and committed to, various measures and decisions throughout the organisation's course of operations must be taken such that the goal is always fixated upon, strived towards, and never lost sight of.

Pitamber Kaushik is a journalist, columnist, writer, educator, and independent researcher. His writing has appeared in over 140 publications across 45+ countries. He is currently based out of XLRI Jamshedpur (Xavier School of Management), India.

Sketch: TBS