Fables and Strategy- An intriguing Connection

Books of fables are essentially Children’s books. But Children’s stories can have a dramatically different impression on the mind when one grows older. An average person would have three encounters with children’s stories in her lifetime, first as a child when it is read to her, then she reads it to her children and finally when she has to repeat the act as a grandparent to her children’s children. Each of these encounters is likely to open a new perspective to the mind of the reader. There are some such stories, that have stood the test of time through thousands of years. The Epics of Greece The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Indian Epics The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, Aesop’s fables, The Jataka Tales, The Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, The Fables of La Fontaine and The Panchatantra are some of the examples of timeless literature some of which have lived through more than two thousand years. Scientific inventions through the centuries, have added so many capabilities in the repertoire of the modern man, so much capability to build and destroy, cure and kill, that it’d have awed even the Gods of two thousand years ago, if they decided to descend on earth today! Yet, amid the unimaginable levels of complexities and simplifications brought about by technology, knowledge and capabilities to the human existence in the meantime, these stories remain as relevant to the modern mankind as they were thousands of years ago to their ancient forefathers!

What makes these stories so special? I will take one example here from the ancient Indian book Panchatantra to try to understand the depth of the arguments ensconced in an innocuous Children’s story which I had heard and read in the form of a comic book when I was a child! The folklore has it, that Panchatantra, is a string of stories carefully interweaved by one Vishnu Sharma, who was requested by the King of the ancient Indian Kingdom of Mahilaropya, to educate his three refractory children. Vishnu Sharma, then eighty years old, took up the challenge to educate these children in six months’ time and succeeded in doing so. He did not accept anything as a reward for his work. These stories, over the next few centuries travelled rapidly to Arab world and Europe and produced many translations with local variations in Arabic, Latin, Italian, French and English by the 1400s. Its influence is most eminently visible in at least three Classics of future, The Arabian Nights, The Canterbury tales and The Fables of La Fontaine.

One of the hundreds of stories in Panchatantra is the story of the “The Crow and The Serpent”. Keeping in mind, the thousands of years old tradition of storytelling in India, I will also try to tell the story here in a summarized form in my own way and then delve deeper to analyze the message woven through it and see if it still holds any relevance today!

Once upon a time, a crow couple, a crow and a hen crow, lived in peace and tranquility in a massive Banyan tree. But when they built a nest and started to have a family, they caught the attention of a deadly Cobra, which lived in a burrow at the foot of the tree. It climbed up the tree and ate the chicks and destroyed the eggs. This happened repeatedly and the crow couple were powerless to fight this menace. They couldn’t also leave the tree as it had been their house for long. Devastated by this misfortune, one day they decided to consult their friend the wise old Jackal! The Jackal listened to their plight and came up with a master plan to combat the menace of the Cobra. He asked the crow to steal the ornament of the princess and fly away. The King’s men would chase him. The crow should fly back right to the tree and carefully drop the ornament into the burrow of the snake.

The next morning the crow did exactly as the Jackal had instructed. He flew to the palace, picked up the princess’s diamond necklace and flew away. Cursing and red with rage, her guards charged behind. The crow flew back towards the tree with the guards following closely, dropped the necklace into the burrow and flew away to join his wife at a nearby tree to watch the fate of the Cobra. As the King’s men tried to retrieve the necklace from inside the burrow the Cobra hissed and charged. It was immediately surrounded by the men and beaten to death. They retrieved the necklace and went back to the palace. The crows thanked the Jackal profusely and lived happily ever after!

As a child nearly forty years ago, I must have felt happy that the cruel snake got punished for its evil deeds! My Son too felt the same way few years back, when I read the story to him. He plays Minecraft with his friends now with the aid of the internet. When I was his age, I played cricket and football physically and had no internet. All children, with or without access to the internet, feel happy and reassured at the fall of the evil. As an older man, I looked closely at the finer nuances of the story and tried to assess them in the larger contexts of the world.

Let me now present my view of this Children’s story from the perspective of an adult! The crow couple had a serious problem! They were being harmed regularly and were powerless to resolve the problem in the context of their conflict with the venomous Cobra! Therefore, to find a remedy they had to engage an independent expert who could have a look at the problem objectively and devise a strategy to overcome the problem! Enter the wise Jackal! Let us try to follow the Jackal’s amazing chain of thought! Since, the Crows on their own, were incapable to confront the cobra, a third party, with the powers to take on and destroy the Cobra, must be engaged in the conflict! But why would a powerful third party pick up a fight with the dangerous Cobra to save the crow? They won’t normally! So, a situation of conflict must be manufactured. How can that happen? It can happen if the third party has something very important at stake and the Cobra comes in the way! Now who could be that Third party? Let us try the King! But how? Only, if something dear to the king is found in the Cobra’s possession, then he might be engaged to retrieve it. But what is that thing! Could it be a piece of jewelry? No, it can’t be just any piece of jewelry. The King has plenty of it. Why should he bother to engage his men to retrieve it? He can buy any jewelry he wishes to! But what if it belongs to the Princess and it’s her favourite necklace and she would not agree to part with it at any cost. It must be her priceless necklace then, that needs to be stolen. From here, a piece of Jewelry becomes “The Jewelry”, a definite object, that would be central to triggering a conflict. The Princess wouldn’t part with the necklace. She is the dearest to her Father, the King. That would force The King and in turn his men to be drawn into the conflict to retrieve the necklace. Thus, conceptualizing a stratagem on a reasonably secured ground, the Jackal proceeds to instruct the crow on what to do. From here, the job of the Jackal, the consultant or the adviser finishes, and the success of the idea depends entirely on the excellence in execution of this stratagem.

Let us try and assess what the Crow had to do. I have tried to use my imagination here to get to the detail of the story. He had to fly to the palace in the morning. Sit innocuously on a tree close to a window or balcony of the dressing room of the princess. She would come to the room along with her maids after bath to get ready for the court. It is then that the jewelry, including her favourite necklace would be laid out on a table in front of her to choose from for the day. At this moment, the crow must take everyone by surprise, by suddenly flying into the room and before anyone could understand, pick the necklace from the table and fly out of the window! Difficult, but entirely possible! But the Crow mustn’t fly away altogether, it has to wait on a nearby treetop with the necklace prominently hanging from its beaks, so that it’s fully visible to the people on the ground and to allow time for the Princess and her maids to shriek and alert the guards who’d then start a chase and give themselves a realistic chance of retrieving it . If the crow flew away directly, the King’s men might have given up the chase as hopeless. So, they must be engaged in a chase where they always have a reasonable hope of retrieving the necklace. Now the crow must embark on an exceptional flight. It must fly high enough to evade any objects like spears, arrows or stones thrown at it by the chasing men, but low enough to always remain visible. It must fly fast enough to keep the distance from the running men, but slow enough to allow the men to keep on chasing without losing sight of the bird or the hope of retrieving the necklace. Now comes the most important and difficult endgame. In the last laps of this exhilarating race, the crow, as it gets within striking range of it’s target, must increase the pace of flying slightly to go ahead a few more paces of the chasing men, nosedive into the foot of the tree, really close to the opening of the burrow of the Cobra (remember it was at the foot of the tree), drop the necklace accurately into the burrow, so that it falls deep inside the burrow, and this act must happen in the full view of the men running close behind so that they know where to look for the necklace. After performing this Houdini act, the crow must immediately flee upwards into a high and safe branch of a nearby tree, to watch the climax of this thriller. It is to gain this fleeing time, and the risk of coming close to the ground to drop the necklace the crow must create that additional head start. A master plan, no doubt and by this time a simple Children’s story has started to look like a full-blown "Money Heist" plan and the Jackal starring as Le Professor of Le Casa de Papel.

As the King’s men, now enthused by this development and with increased hope of retrieving the necklace charge on to the burrow, and dig it with their spears, they immediately invoke an angry response from the Cobra. Now the game has gone too far, and the thrill of the chase and treasure hunt have overtaken the minds of the men. They have no other way to retrieve the necklace other than smashing the Cobra’s head and they do so without any mercy. Remember on another day they may have left the Cobra alone or tried to dislodge the snake otherwise, but this stake was too high. With the Princess’s favourite necklace at stake, their jobs were on the line and they were in sight of retrieving that situation. The last thing you’d expect from them is consideration for other things. The manufactured conflict is over. Once the men retrieve the necklace they are no more interested in the crow and rejoice their success and run back towards the palace. One must admit that the stratagem the Jackal had drawn, was heavily dependent on the core competence of the victim, the crows. The core competence of a bird is flying. This capability was tested to its extreme in this plan. A stratagem, no matter how good, must also consider the feasibility of implementation, and a plan has the best chance of succeeding when it uses the core competence of the assignee. In the larger context of business, organizations and individuals should continue to focus on their core strengths and competence areas. Often, an organization or individual is too busy to mend a weakness rather that building on the strength that they have. Weakness is vivid in one’s memory due to some past embarrassment, insult or any other unpleasant experience. It does not mean that one should forget one’s strengths trying to improve upon ones weaknesses. This is also amply demonstrated in the Jackal’s stratagem. It focuses on the Crows core strength of flying to implement a solution for its conflict with the Cobra. At the first look the Crows flying skills seem worthless at the beginning, but the Jackal manages to create a context where the Crows competence plays a pivotal role in attaining the desired objectives. Therefore, in the context of the crow, its capability of flying and the capability to outmaneuver human beings in the flight was used in this plan and it succeeded. The fable says that the crows lived happily ever after. My interpretation is that they lived happily not just because one Cobra was dead, but because they had learnt the importance of expert advice and hone their core competence to win future games against future Cobras.

I have consciously used the word stratagem above and not strategy. This plan was a clever ploy to achieve an immediate objective, and the word stratagem fits better to describe this. A strategy is a much larger matter. That brings us back to the ancient teacher Vishnu Sharma who purportedly told these stories to educate the three refractory sons of the King of Mahilaropya. No concrete historical evidence is found on the exact identity or even existence of Vishnu Sharma. However, one school of thought believes that he was the same person as Vishnugupta Chanakya, the ancient strategist who brought about the downfall of the Nanda Empire and Helped the Maurya Dynasty to come to power in the ancient Kingdom of Magadha. Chanakya was also known as Kautilya who wrote “Arthashastra” the ancient and first acclaimed book on Public Administration. This book talks about a fundamental strategy. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In Arthashastra, the definition of Enemy and Friend is very clearly demarcated. In his book Arthashastra Book VI “The source of Sovereign States”, Kautilya writes “The king who is situated anywhere on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed as enemy. The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed as a friend.”

This timeless strategy is used in many forms and guises in Geopolitics and Corporate wars across the world. Most notably in the last century it is visible in the strategic alignments in the second world war. The West allied with the ideologically opposite Soviet Block to contain the advancements of Hitler. On the eve of German Invasion of Soviet Union, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is known to have famously said to his personal secretary John Colville “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons”. Later this gesture was reciprocated by Soviet Union.

How many times do we see such alignments, in cartel formations or strategic mergers and Acquisitions in the corporate context, where companies who are competitors, join hands for survival against a larger adversary? How many times we see Geopolitics being run by this strategy and Nations with apparent ideological or other differences join hands to form different blocks? For children who are supposed to grow up and take positions of eminence in the world, if she remembers what the Jackal told the crow, as a grown up she stands a good chance to understand the finer nuances of the dynamics of business, economics and polity at large!

Going back to the start, an individual’s changed perspectives towards children’s stories across three different stages of life is also about individual transformation and changed views towards life. Individual transformation and Organizational Transformation, though largely different matters have some attributes in common. While responding to a change one mustn’t try to oversimplify things by copying another individual or organization that appears to be successful. This can have disastrous effects. Rather one should understand the change and be able to create the right context that exploits their own strengths to the fullest to create a relevant context before embracing that change. This is the crux of a sustainable transformation. That is not a simple thing to achieve. So, we may again have to turn the pages of Children’s stories to find inspiration. Panchatantra has an interesting take on that too, with yet another story! But that’s for the next time!

Disclaimer: The views and opinion expressed in this article are entirely that of the author and has nothing to do with the organization that he works for.