[CarpetBench]

Interesting article.

Not sure I totally find this persuasive: The author tries his damnedest to draw a distinction between "unpredictability" and "secrecy", but it ends up being pretty murky.

For example:

> Keeping secrets can protect competitive advantage. Imag­ine the D-Day invasion of Normandy if the Allies had announced dates and locations.

> But secrecy is not the same thing as unpredictability... Unpredictability bluffs, postures, and palters to gain advantage through uncertainty and misdirection.

Wasn't a big part of the D-day strategy to feed misinformation to the Germans? Weren't the beaches at Normandy significantly depleted on the German side because the Germans thought the allied invasion was happening somewhere else (Italy? I don't recall offhand).

His other points are similarly iffy:

> The leader — the strategist... They propose a race rather than a duel.

Isn't proposing a different contest a fairly unpredictable move? Secrecy and unpredictability seem more-or-less synonymous when viewed through the lens of your competitor.

It seems like by "unpredictable" he means "making moves that seem to provide no net benefit," not actually "unpredictable."

[devoply]

It depends in some cases you can't be unpredictable to your competition without being unpredictable to everyone else. In other cases you can. Strategy is about knowing when you can and can't be unpredictable. It's fine to be unpredictable to make your competition think that you want a company when you don't, so they waste a bunch more money than they should in acquiring it. Not so with your next product.

[CarpetBench]

I don't disagree with you, but that isn't really what the article is saying. The article is all but making a blanket statement that "unpredictability = bad in any context":

> Behaving unpredictably with one group — customers, employees, competitors, suppliers, etc. — means exposing your unpredictability to all.