Army Reserves veteran and former Foundations Recovery Network (FRN) CIO and CMO Lee Pepper offers this guide to succeeding in business using strategies taken from the military.

Pepper’s book joins many business books that co-opt military ideas. His focus is specifically on marketing, however, a twist that lends at least a hint of freshness to the approach.

Using mental models inspired by military strategy, he says, bonds leader and team and endears the leader to his/her own peers. More than half the book is given over to references to famous historical military leaders, from Alexander the Great to General Patton, and descriptions of their various strategies and endeavors. Prompts to apply these lessons to everyday marketing challenges follow.

For example, using the familiar military concept of the “fog of war,” he suggests that “planners create multiple scenarios and fallback options to serve as contingency plans.” Managers need to understand their opponents (analyze their competitors); work with allies (cultivate mutually beneficial relationships), and so on. Such advice runs from the macro (use force multipliers to assert significant influence using minimal force) to the micro (utilize SITREPs, or situation reports, to effectively communicate directives).

Pepper’s own directives are simply established business procedures dressed up in either military frameworks or military-style acronyms, e.g., the “DRAW model” (“Discover,” “Research,” “Answer,” and “Work it out”) of responding to negative customer reviews, which is basically standard operating procedure for most marketing managers. The lessons often jump around and are interrupted with unnecessary clip-art style drawings.

Pepper’s enthusiasm for both military history and marketing are admirable, but there’s not enough new here to make his book stand out in a crowded arena of similar titles. Paradoxically, Never Outmatched will be a tough one to market.

Also available as an ebook and audio book.