The Committee of Public Safety

Cold War

Here’s some Sunday night synergy: George Frost Kennan and spaghetti sauce. Cue Kennan:

DAVID GERGEN: Let me ask you this in terms of thinking back over then of that period of American foreign policy in the last forty or fifty years, one of the ironies here is that in an age of information you suggest we have too little wisdom.

GEORGE KENNAN: Yes, I do, and one of the things that bothers me about the computer culture of the present age is that one of the things of which it seems to me we have the least need is further information. What we really need is intelligent guidance in what to do with the information we’ve got.

DAVID GERGEN: There are echoes in what you’re saying of Barbara Tuchman as she looked back over history, she wrote that book The March of Folly, and indeed, Robert McNamara in his most recent book has argued that Vietnam was based on some false understandings on our part or false wisdom on our part.

GEORGE KENNAN: It was. Well, it was–we look for general policies, very sweeping policies–

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

GEORGE KENNAN: –in the world. And that isn’t the way international affairs work. We ought to look at every problem on its own merits.

DAVID GERGEN: Um-hmm.

GEORGE KENNAN: I see a groping on the part of our people today. They say, well, the Cold War is over, but what’s going to become the worldwide basis of American foreign policy now?

DAVID GERGEN: Yes.

GEORGE KENNAN: And they don’t realize you can’t confront it that way. This is a big world. It’s a developing world. It’s not a static world. It’s full of different forces contending with each other.

New World Order

Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz would agree. Dr. Moskowitz is the George Frost Kennan of spaghetti sauce. However, where Kennan had one gigantic insight (and he claims he was misunderstood on his way to immortality):

In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.

Moskowitz had three insights that revolutionized strategy forever:

1. There are different types of mustard for different types of people.
2. The mind knows not what the tongue wants.
3. There is no Platonic dish.

Moskowitz was hired by Pepsi to find the perfect level of sweetness for the first incarnation of Diet Pepsi. He conducted a wide ranging national taste test and gathered thousands of samples. When he sat down to look at the data it didn’t make sense. While expecting it to flow easily into a bell curve, it refused to be so bent and so distributed. Moskowitz moved on to other projects but pondered this original conundrum for years afterwords (saying, if you’re a worm in horseradish, all the world is horseradish). Then one day he had a stunning insight that changed the way Americans eat forever: you shouldn’t be looking for the perfect Pepsi; you should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.

At one time, Prego was looking for a way to beat market leader Ragu in the battle for the spaghetti sauce market. They were lagging badly behind Ragu’s watery, runny red sauce despite Prego having better ingredients and flavor. They were bewildered. Moskowitz went into their kitchen, created 46 possible variations on spaghetti sauce, and test marketed them. He then analysed the results. He was able to identify three clusters of spaghetti sauce consumption: plain, spicy, and extra chunky.

Moskowitz then had to confront the Gray Poupon delusion. Gray Poupon came along in the early Eighties when there was two brands of mustard and they were both yellow mustard: mustard, turmeric, and paprika. Grey Poupon put their more flash mustard in a nice little jar, charged three bucks more for it, and had a stunning success. Other companies then tried to find the right mustards of aspiration until Moskowitz convinced them that there was no right mustard and no wrong mustard. There were merely different types of mustards for different types of people. This insight led to a proliferation of flavors and variety on grocery store shelves. From a tiny seed a great tree of products grew.

Back to spaghetti. The discovery of the three types of spaghetti leads to Moskowitz’s second insight: the mind knows not what the tongue wants. Two types of spaghetti were known: plain and spicy. The third, extra chunky, was not. Only through his taste test was Moskowitz able to discover that an incredible one third of Americans had a desire for extra chunky spaghetti sauce. The kicker was that the one third of Americans who had a desire for extra chunky spaghetti sauce didn’t know that they wanted extra chunky spaghetti sauce either. It was an accidental discovery that Prego was able to exploit when they realized there was an invisible extra chunky spaghetti sauce market that was lying there, unexploited. The first extra chunky spaghetti sauce was an immediate success: Prego made $600,ooo,ooo from extra chunky spaghetti sauce alone. The fundamental moral of the story: people don’t consciously know what they want so asking them isn’t going to get you anywhere. It’s finding out what they unconsciously want that will get you somewhere.

Moskowitz’s third insight is that there is no Platonic dish. There was an obsession within the food industry with finding the one perfect dish. Moskowitz demonstrated that the search was in vain: there was no perfect disk. He found that, in trying to choose a perfect coffee, he could generally achieve about 65% approval of one blend by everybody. However, if he split it into different clusters and gave each cluster its own flavor of coffee, satisfaction with the blend would rise to 78%. The overall conclusion: greater diversity of choices leads to greater possibilities for happiness for more people.

What does this have to do with strategy?

I would suggest three possible implications for strategy (defining strategy as the reconciliation of desire with power):

1. There are different types of strategies for different types of people.
2. Politics does not know what strategy culture wants.
3. There is no Platonic strategy.

Not goo

It may be a mistake for a nation as diverse in its population as the United States to have One Strategy to Rule Them All. Having many strategies for many parts of the world, as George Frost Kennan suggested, may be the only way to deal with the staggering diversity of the various populations who are at multiple levels of stateness at one time. Some are open states, some are secret states, and some are silent states. It may be better for American strategy to be constituted as goo rather than a monolithic block. Hard to say. I doubt that it’s entirely the right solution because of this problem: a successful strategy in one area may be an unsuccessful strategy in another area. For example, NATO expansion in the 1990s and 200os may have been good in Europe but it may have also reunified China and Russia, one of the great realignments produced by American diplomacy in the 1970s. Whether emergent strategy would suffer from the same defect is an unknown quantity.

The second implication of Moskowitz’s ideas for strategy, that politics does not know what strategy culture wants, its possibly more important than the last implication. Culture is an emergent process in which one desire is prioritized over another. Culture is the art of the unspoken assumption. Part of the process of emergence is detecting those desires that are most unconscious and aligning power to them. This is the process of politics, the division of power between cultural ends. It may be that the search for a single strategy that’s at variance with the extra chunky spaghetti desire that lies hidden in the cultural grocery store will lead to more problems than the more obvious mismatch between politics and strategy. It may be that the first task of strategy is to tease out the hidden cultural desires that fundamentally support its effort.

The third implication is probably the hardest for some. There has been a great desire, as even Kennan noticed, to have a single perfect strategy to tie all of the loose ends of American policy together that would be as comprehensive as containment. Chances are that such a thing is neither possible or desirable. There is no perfect strategy, only the virtues of variety for a complex nation. Such a grand frame emerges, as it does from time to time, it’s unlikely that it will be as hallowed and pure as the Ten Commandments carved with the divine Finger upon the mount. It will be a grand mess of things touched and handled by every politician in the vicinity of the kitchen. Attempts at achieving perfect strategy may also lock you into a less than effective strategy that just looks perfect. That can lock you into an inflexible and vulnerable position at just the wrong moment.

However, for all of those searching for a single word like containment to sum up and rationalize American strategy in the last twenty years, I give you this one magical word: burrito.