Good enough

The Strategy Toolkit - January 2024 edition

Excerpt:  Strategy & Crime

Similar to the negative of a photograph, from the perspective of strategy, crime is the negative of the law.  Wherever there are laws, throughout time, there have been those unwilling or unable to abide by the laws.  And how they choose to act at those times is rife with strategies.

Sometimes, sadly, being willing and able to break a law can mean the difference between life and death, and the instinct for survival kicks in.  We swerve the car into oncoming traffic to avoid an immediate collision.  We disobey police orders to turn around during the wildfires of Lahaina and take that shortcut we know from childhood, surviving the tragedy as a result.  We hide life-saving medicines in our luggage and don’t declare them at customs.  We hold down multiple jobs in the grey economy just to make enough to pay the bills.  We follow in the footsteps of the legendary Robin Hood and take wealth from the fortunate ones and give it to the unfortunate ones in a time of great injustice.

The desperation born out of poverty quickly shades into cleverness and ingenuity in response to perceptions of relative deprivation.  People can rationalise and find justifications for the whole range of law-breaking imaginable when using narrow and individualistic logic.  There’s always something or someone “unfair” to point at.  In fact, it’s the very use of strategies of relativism that makes the topic of strategy & crime full of insights.  Good strategists study what criminals do and how, and re-apply these ideas over to areas of action completely legal and acceptable.  Just look at the academic research into the business models and operations of US-Central American drug cartels as an example.  Or the sanction-avoiding financial strategies of Russia or China or Iran or North Korea.

Of course, this discussion of crime is focused on legal crime, as opposed to moral crime.  Using the analogy above of “the photographic negative”, then moral crime is viewed in contrast with religion and philosophy.  Some follow the tenets of a religion or community and some do not.  The world of legal criminality comes into play when the level or degree of harm exceeds agreed upon limits.  We’ll return to this topic later when addressing political crime.

Let’s set aside the simplistic case of the desperate individual who, facing starvation, shoplifts something to eat.  Most religions and communities use reasonable measures of kindness in such situations.  Instead, let’s look at the next degree of complexity, the world of business.

“Russia has plenty of businessmen who enjoy wealth and power. There are the natural-resource barons who grabbed the country's oil, gas and mineral riches after the collapse of communism; there are managers adroit at siphoning off their firm's revenues for personal gain; there are monopolists and cartel-mongers, who use connections to squash competition, and thus make such businesses as selling petrol or building materials fantastically lucrative…

“Many Russians are talented and well-informed, but find that their businesses suffocate, either from a shortage of capital or from the unwelcome attentions of tax collectors and gangsters.

“[Anatoly Klimin’s] first big advantage was that he started more than 20 years ago, when commerce was not only risky, but illegal.”*

* Anonymous, “Ivan of all trades,” The Economist (November 7 1998): 73

Ironically, under the most doctrinaire communist regimes, owning and operating a business is a criminal activity.  Entrepreneurs like Klimin who manage to survive and prosper can draw upon their experiences and strategies to expand their operations elsewhere.