The Art of War
Sun Tzu - With Interpretation by Gerald A. Michaelson

The art of war has all the romantic mystery of any ancient Asian literature. Reading the original text ("Sun Tzu said...") reminded me of prior reading of Zen Buddhism and Feng Shui. While the mystery and vagueness of ancient Asian writing can be intruiging, I find that it can trivialize the inherent lessons at times. This is one reason that I enjoyed The Art of War: For Managers so much.





The Art of War: For Managers not only contains a significant amount of the original text translated from Sun Tzu, (which I also read through, pictured left), but it gives very applicable and interesting business parallels to the war lessons, and ties the ideas of war and business together. It also has many interesting snippets from specific business cases that help to keep the reader engaged and interested. While one might be able to draw many inferences from the original Sun Tzu text on their own, this book makes it much easier to find business parallels for each idea outlined in the original Art of War text. It also offers valuable alternate translations for areas of controversy.






For example, For Managers translates Sun Tzu's five constant factors as below:

1. Moral Influence = Spirit of Mission: Belief in a sound moral purpose rallies fighting spirit and generates a firestorm of commitment
2. Weather = Outside Forces: Consolidation, world competition, and environmentalism can all be seen as outside forces.
3. Terrain = The Marketplace: As a general must know the terrain, so the strategy must consider the scene of action - people, place, product, promotion, and price, etc...
4. Commander = Leadership: This is rather obvious
5. Doctrine = Guiding Principals: Understanding and applying the fundamental principals of planning and execution to achieve success.

You will have to read The Art of War for yourself to gain all of the valuable lessons it contains, for the book is already very concise (as is customary in Asian literature), which makes it hard to cover in this short summary without simply paraphrasing, but I will try to illustrate some of the more interesting parallels that the book covers here.

Sun Tzu says: To forecast the outcome of a war the attributes of the antagonistic sides should be analyzed by making the following seven comparisons...

Ford Motor Company benchmarked six other well-run companies and found the following key attributes: executives spent time outside their offices communicating with employees, people and their skills were a competitive advantage, trust replaced controls, cross-functional teams developed cutting-edge products and services, bureaucracy was out and teams were in, authority was delegated, training was readily available, and each benchmarked company said it was customer driven

IBM Rochester cut their computer manufacturing cycle time from 246 days to less than 30 days by benchmarking other successful companies processes.

Benchmarking is a learning experience that "steals shamelessly" from friend and foe alike. These case studies show just how important it is to properly evaluate your competition - both to be able to compete with them, but possibly more importantly to be able to improve your own internal processes by imitating the successful practices that already exist somewhere else.

Sun Tzu says: Generally, in war the best thing of all is to take the enemy's state whole and intact; to ruin it is inferior to this. To capture the enemy's entire army is better than to destroy it...

The manager's commentary translates this as the ability to introduce a new product or business concept and rush to expand rapidly, capturing markets ahead of competition. Subway, Home Depot, and Starbucks are all examples of this "early innovator" type of capturing initial market share. In other words, "Why fight for market share when you can just create a new market and have it all?"

Sun Tzu says: Now, the elements of the art of war are first, the measurement of space; second, the estimation of quantities; third, the calculation of figures; fourth, comparisons of strength; and fifth, chances of victory.

Translation: Use data to plan overwhelming advantages. At Ford's monthly strategy meetings, data is reviewed on the profitability and growth potential of Ford's broad line of car and truck models. This information on the customer's preferences is used to rapidly and surgically eliminate products that are no longer in demand.

While these examples only barely scrape the broad spectrum of lessons illustrated by The Art of War, I hope that they do motivate you to pick up the book. The two books together total less than $20 and they contain some of the most concise business lessons I have seen anywhere. While reading through the original translation is valuable and makes you think, I really suggest you pick up the For Managers edition as well - It really helped me draw some valuable conclusions and lessons from the original text that I would not have otherwise.