Bottoms Up = Top Down

On the Dialectic of Strategy and Tactics

Do you write the novel by putting down sentence after sentence? Or do you you write it from a tight outline and detailed character notes? The first approach describes the creative process of E.L. Doctorow, who compares writing to driving a car at night, going only by headlight. The second describes the process of J.K. Rowling who mapped out the entire narrative arc of Harry Potter before setting pen to paper. The first is sometimes called “Bottoms up” writing, the second “top down.”

Bottoms up thinking characterizes Aristotelian philosophy, whereby the goal is to gather information and produce and revise taxonomies reactively. Plato, by contrast is a top down thinker, which is why his political philosophy is also top down: philosophers should rule society, just as knowledge production is secondary to recollection of the eternal Forms.

According to Hamilton Helmer, the core difference between strategy and tactics comes down to time horizon. Do you expect your action to pay off in the short term (tactics) or long term (strategy). Only 4 companies in the S and P 500 were around 90 years ago. Strategy can be thought of as the art of trying to influence the long term future. In the short term, things are more predictable. That’s why everyone loves tactics. Tactically you can measure cause and effect. On the strategic plane, it’s harder to know what will be. But the difference between strategy and tactics can also be thought of as the difference between top down and bottom up thinking. Strategists hew to an idea, tacticians to the necessity of the moment. “The long term” is a temporal marker of—and short hand for “the eternal.” It is the human approximation of the Platonic form. For what endures for 100 years is more likely to endure for 1,000 and thus 10,000, and if you add up the years, the hope is that it asymptotically approaches the Infinite.

Take a bottoms up approach to life and it will seem aimless and reactive. Take a top down approach and it may feel rigid, overly controlled, and incapable of responding to failure and new opportunity.

In Jewish mysticism, there is a teaching—attributed to Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi—that “the lowest is the highest.” Keter, the crown = Malchut, the root. The divine mind = the congregation of Israel. If we accept the thesis that the lowest expresses the highest, then we can say that tactics express strategy. The reactive, short-term state = The Platonic, long-term vision.

More practically, “the lowest is the highest” suggests that Doctorow isn’t without a strategy—his strategy is simply implicit in and emergent from his driving by headlight. For those who want to be less bottom up, less tactical, and more top-down, more thoughtful, mindful, planful, consider the mystical teaching that you don’t need a strategic vision to be a strategist. You don’t need a long term thesis to have a long-term understanding. A long term thesis can be reverse engineered from your actions. “Light is sewn for the righteous”: The strategic light is hidden in the tactical dark. Let us uncover it.