Seth Godin on Standing Out

Seth Godin feels that days of status quo marketing through the television industrial complex are coming to an end. People are too busy to pay attention to the nonstop advertising of average products for average people. What grabs people's attention is something remarkable, or rather something worth making a remark about. And their remarks spread the ideas or products to the world and make it a success. Learn about the cutting edge of spreading ideas with this talk by Seth Godin.

Personal Success Strategy

To achieve personal success, you should first know what you want. You should first know your destination. Then, after knowing your destination, you should figure out how to get there.
I recently read a great strategy about “how to get there” in the book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz. While the strategy is aimed at companies, I believe that it’s just as applicable to individuals. The strategy is called “tacking” which comes from the sailing world:

He (the sailor) knows that he will not follow a straight line; the changing winds alone will not allow for that. Instead, he will travel in a zigzag-like pattern.
By tacking, the sailor travels a short distance, maximizing the winds and avoiding hazards. He then analyzes where he is in relationship to his destination, adjusts the sails, redirects the boat and continues the zag part of his travels. After another short distance he again evaluate his relationship to the destination and adjusts.

These routine adjustments will eventually bring the sailor to his destination.
Isn’t that similar to achieving personal success? You know where you want to go, but the wind always changes along the way. No matter how good your plan is, unexpected things always happen. You need to respond to them and adjust your actions accordingly or you may never reach your destination.
For me, this is a great idea that I have started applying. From my past experiences, I know that things always change and a tactic might not work for long. Holding to it in the name of habit or discipline will only take me further away from my destination.
So now I decide to use the tacking strategy on a monthly basis. Here is what I do:

1. I look at my life purpose and its one-liner.
2. I set a goal of the year related to my life purpose.
3. Based on the goal of the year, I set some specific objectives for the month. I set the objectives based on what I think are the best tactics to achieve my goal.
4. I work hard the entire month to achieve my objectives for the month.
5. Near the end of the month, I evaluate how things are going. Did I choose the right objectives? Do the objectives take me closer to my goal? Do I find better tactics to apply?
6. Based on the evaluation, I set new objectives for the following month. These objectives could be the same or different from the previous ones.

That’s how I apply the tacking strategy. I do my best to travel a short distance (one month in this case) before evaluating my position and adjusting my actions. In my opinion, tacking is a very good strategy for personal success. It allows you to adapt to changing situation.
One question you might have is: why monthly? One month is the best duration for me. It’s long enough to apply a tactic but still gives me twelve opportunities a year to adjust my actions. Of course, your situation may be different, so find the duration that works for you.

Focus, but why ?

Confucius says: “Man who chases two rabbits catches neither!”

“I’d rather be strong somewhere than weak everywhere”.

When managers know they have only one battle to fight it concentrates their minds wonderfully.

Companies that broaden their line, for whatever reason, are vulnerable to narrowly focused competition that takes advantage of division.

Nobody loses business just because they have a broad focus. To lose business you have to run up against a competitor with a narrow focus.

What’s needed for success is focus, which sometimes can be achieved with a full line of products, but with sacrifices' made in other areas. Distribution could be one such area. Dell Computer deselected retail distribution and direct sales force with success.

Some managers equate size with power. Is a large company more powerful than a small one? Not necessarily. A highly focused company is more powerful than a less focused company.

What provide an organization with its power is its degree of focus and its share of market. Size is only important if it contributes to an increase in market share.

Power gives a company the ability to “control” an industry, taking it in a direction that will only increase the company’s power and domination.

Wouldn’t it be easier to increase the share of a business you know than to get a share of a business you don’t know?

A focus is not forever.

At any point in time, a company has 3 kinds of products. (1) yesterdays products, which are candidates for disposal; (2) today’s products, which are producing the bulk of the company’s profits; and (3) tomorrow’s products, which are the company’s future.

Nothing stays still long enough for a company to be perfectly focused.

Sooner or later even the most powerful focus becomes obsolete. That’s when a company must refocus itself.

Focus, the future of your company depends on it.

Abstracts from: “Focus, The future of your company depends on it”, by Al Ries

Trial, Error and the God Complex by Tim Harford

Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times. His column, “The Undercover Economist”, reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. He is also the only economist in the world to run a problem page, “Dear Economist”, in which readers’ personal problems are answered tongue-in-cheek with the latest economic theory.
Tim’s first book, “The Undercover Economist” has sold one million copies worldwide in almost 30 languages.

Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.

Paul Bloom on the Situation of Pleasure

Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.

Just do it

This is an excerpt from an interesting article i read on The Times titled Spoilt for Choice by Liz Hollis

* * *

For the naturally indecisive, Hell is choosing what to put in your supermarket trolley. Successfully negotiate the 38 choices of milk that I counted for sale in my local Tesco (organic, skimmed, soya, omega3 enriched or filtered for purity) and you’re then confronted with jam overload: 154 flavours.
Selecting from the banks of rosehip jam handcrafted in the Pyrenees, fig conserve, Scandinavian blackcurrant with “bits” or without, could take you all day. Then there’s the aisle with 107 varieties of pasta and 98 types of fruit cordial . . .
Choice aplenty – indeed, so much that psychologists now believe that it is making us miserable. Most big supermarkets provide us with about 30,000 products, and each year they add more. Indeed, for a taste of what the future might look like in every store, visit the latest temple of runaway choice – the giant new American Whole Foods Market in Kensington High Street, West London. Here, choice rules supreme. You can choose from 1,000 wine labels, 100 types of nuts, oats and grains and more than 40 varieties of sausage.
“I feel as though I’ve been punched in the face after I’ve been round somewhere like Morrisons,” says Joy Miller, 39, who runs a communications business in Norwich. “It’s so overwhelming that it just makes you feel awful. If you carefully considered every aspect – ethics, food miles, price, flavour and ingredients – you’d never get round to buying anything, ever.”
Of course, it doesn’t stop at groceries. Everywhere you turn there is a mind-boggling parade of clothes, gadgets, financial products, holidays and entertainment. Tantalised by all these buying options, we stockpile our shopping baskets, homes and lives with ever more consumer goods that we probably don’t need or even appreciate. And this isn’t good for our happiness.
“The huge number of choices that assault us every day makes many of us feel inadequate and in some cases even clinically depressed,” says Professor Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice.“ There is vastly too much choice in the modern world and we are paying an enormous price for it. It makes us feel helpless, mentally paralysed and profoundly dissatisfied.”
Professor Schwartz believes that the dogma of all Western societies – that maximising freedom and choice increases welfare – is deeply flawed. “It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually you’ll be able to buy a mobile phone with integral nasal-hair trimmer and crème brûle torch,” he speculates sardonically.
So why does having so much choice make us feel miserable? Shouldn’t we be delighted that we can travel to any corner of the planet for our holidays, or select from tens of thousands of financial plans? Sadly not. Because making a decision is now a nightmare. We can easily end up with what psychologists call “consumer vertigo”, that is, swamped with so many options that we can’t make any decision, or decide wrongly.
“So much choice makes decision-making increasingly complex,” says David Shanks, a psychology professor and the co-author of Straight Choices, a new book that examines how to make the best decisions when faced with a perplexing array of options. We feel bad that every time we do make a choice, it seems we are missing out on other opportunities. This makes us feel inadequate and dissatisfied with what we have chosen. Often, we feel bamboozled and just shove a familiar or prominently displayed brand into our basket. Then we feel useless because we can’t cook gourmet dinners like Jamie Oliver and don’t know what to do with any of these exotic new ingredients. So we end up buying and eating the same meals time and again.
This excess also numbs us to the heady pleasure felt by previous generations when they bought something new in an era when budgets were leaner and consumer goods in shorter supply. All we can think about now is what we still want to buy, rather than appreciating what we have.
Children are not immune, either. How can choosing yet another throwaway plastic trinket from the zoo gift shop ever equal the intensity felt by the 1940s child unwrapping just a couple of presents a year – on their birthday and at Christmas?
Experiments confirm that the less choice we have, the better we feel. Professor Mark Lepper and his team at Stanford University in America found that consumers who tested six jams went on to buy more and feel happier than those offered 24 jams to taste. Another experiment showed that giving students a choice of fewer essay topics made them produce better work.
“This suggests that we thrive when we have less choice,” says Professor Lepper. “Excess choice is paralysis rather than liberation.”
Yet the number of consumer choices available continues to multiply. “It doesn’t help that there is an ever-decreasing amount of expert advice available from shop assistants – if you can find one at all,” says Paco Underhill, chief executive of Envirosell, a research and consulting company. Consequently, many people’s homes are filled with high-tech products that offer still more unwanted choices: washing machines with a host of setting options (though we only ever use two); phones that could send e-mails if only we knew how to use them.
But if all this choice is actually harming us, what can we do about it?
Professor Lepper suggests that, for a start, we should lighten up when selecting, say, a type of bread or a disposable camera. “Don’t take making mundane choices too seriously or it gets to feel like an onerous task,” he says.
Opt for small shops that offer less choice – it’s harder to feel angst-ridden in a smaller supermarket where the choice is simply between big potatoes and small potatoes. In addition, decide on priorities before you look at what’s available – for instance, you could look only at cameras that offer a large playback screen, if that’s crucial for you. And don’t expect to become an expert; ask others who know what to look for.
To preserve mental wellbeing, save your decision-making effort for serious things that merit a large expenditure of time and effort. Then you can make better use of techniques such as those outlined by Professor Shanks and his colleagues.
“Choose when to choose,” says Professor Schwartz. “Don’t worry about what type of mobile-phone package to opt for. Pick a sofa from IKEA in 30 seconds and you’ll feel better than if you spend hours researching sofas – because you won’t know what else you’re missing out on.”
He adds that when it comes to achieving happiness it is better to be a “satisficer” who accepts a good-enough choice than a “maximiser” who always wants to make the best possible decision.
Perhaps we should all learn to love the constraints on our lives. After all, being restricted to a local job because you can’t move your children out of school, or having to buy a house near elderly relatives, makes you (and them) feel better.
“It challenges a lot of our beliefs, but it could just be that choice within constraints will make us feel a lot better,” says Professor Schwartz. “We need to live in the moment, appreciate what we have and not think about all the other things that we could choose instead.”




For excellent twenty-minute video of lecture by Barry schwartz, click on the video below.

A Choice Worth Having

In my last post i mentioned about Professor Barry Shwartz. Here are some excerpts from one of his terrific posts titled "A New Council of Psychological Advisors for President Obama?"


After President Barack Obama figures out how to bring the economy out of recession, stabilize financial institutions, end two wars, and get every citizen health insurance, there is something else that he should consider: The United States needs a Council of Psychological Advisors.
This new body would parallel and complement the Council of Economic Advisors. When economists have the president’s ear, all their whispers concern incentives and self-interest. We need psychologists whispering in his other ear, about the economy, education, healthcare, and more.
On the Economy—Understand the “Irrational” Where did our financial institutions go wrong? Many accounts focus on greed, fear, and lack of trust. And why did things get so out of hand? Why was there a housing “bubble”? Somehow, “irrational exuberance” (Robert Schiller) or “animal spirits” (John Maynard Keynes) overwhelmed rational calculations of risk and reward. And it isn’t just that irrational optimism, or even blindness to market fundamentals, gets the better of our rational faculties. Rather, as George Soros has pointed out, these psychological phenomena can become part of a feedback loop that actually changes market fundamentals. “Reflexivity,” he calls it. The housing bubble was not the first such phenomenon, nor will it be the last.
Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. They also have little to tell us about how to prevent a “downward spiral of negative expectations” that makes fear of an economic downturn self-fulfilling. Economists largely make assumptions about the rationality of human decision-making and proceed from there. Witness Alan Greenspan’s recent admission that he was mistaken in assuming that markets operate rationally and efficiently. The current crisis makes it clear that ignoring the real psychology of greed, fear, trust, and irrational enthusiasm (0r pessimism) can be perilous. Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help.
On Education—More than Just Carrots and Sticks: One of President Obama’s top priorities is to improve the quality of American education. This will require recruiting and retaining excellent teachers and finding ways to motivate students. How can this worthy goal be achieved? At the moment, we’re pointing in the direction of school choice and competition to produce better schools, higher pay to produce better teachers, big tests to monitor their performance, and financial incentives to motivate students. A bunch of carrots and sticks. Will these kinds of measures be enough? Research in psychology suggests not. More important than pay (as long as it is adequate) are working conditions that allow teachers to be flexible, autonomous, and creative in their work with students, and that provide teachers with a sense that they are working in a community that has a common purpose. From this perspective, the regimentation of instruction ushered in by big-test accountability is actually counter-productive. And so is the move, now being tried in pilot projects around the country, to pay students for showing up to class and for getting good grades. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help design environments that encourage students to pursue mastery rather than money and teachers to view their work as a calling.



Moving Beyond GDP: Finally, let us ask the most fundamental question: what is public policy for? We aim to increase collective welfare, but just what does welfare consist in? For the most part, under the sway of economic thinking, our aim has been to make the country more prosperous-to increase per capita GDP. The appeal of this goal is two-fold. First, we assume that if people are richer, they will be freer to choose as individuals the objects and activities that serve their welfare. We (the state and its technocrats) don’t have to choose for them. So wealth serves as a proxy for everything else. And second, GDP can be measured. But like a drunk looking under a lamp post for his car keys, even though he dropped them someplace else (because “that’s where the light is”), it doesn’t help much to pursue what you can measure if what you’re measuring is the wrong thing. It doesn’t help to get better at achieving goals if you’re achieving the wrong goals. Much research in the psychology of well being suggests that some wealth-enhancing policies improve welfare, but others do not. Indeed, some of what it takes to get more prosperous may be counterproductive when it comes to well being. A Council of Psychological Advisors can help here too, in the design of a system of national “psychological accounts” that does a better job of measuring well being than per capita GDP ever could.
Many of us hold out the hope that the coming Obama administration will mark a return to respect for knowledge and expertise. Agencies will be run and staffed not by political cronies, or by people who “just know in their gut” what needs to be done, or by ideologues, but by people who actually have respect for evidence. It would be a shame to bring experts on board in existing agencies, only to have them have to rely on personal intuition rather than knowledge in formulating policies and making decisions that could benefit from psychological expertise. A Council of Psychological Advisors is long overdue. This would be an excellent time to create one.

Barry Schwartz

I was talking to one of my friends here and he mentioned something about Barry Schwartz. I immediately "googled" him and found out that he is an American psychologist. Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He frequently publishes editorials in the New York Times applying his research in psychology to current events.
In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice , Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today's western world is actually making us miserable.

Here is a video tape of the session Barry Schwartz gave at GOOGLE:

Strategy: Vital Signs

My final post on Chapter I of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” ends at the beginning: Sun Tzu’s introduction to the chapter. As Japanese writing structure places the emphasis on the conclusion, not on the beginning, I feel that this is appropriate for an ancient Chinese work, as line-by-line translation contains many perils when trying to understand the crux, the core essence of the view presented.
Even though Sun Tzu himself was a general, he was also a manager. Even though Sun Tzu was not a sovereign, he was also a leader. Not a single word in “The Art of War” reflects a selfish view of himself; Sun Tzu wrote for the benefit of others, that others might benefit from his wisdom and bring benefit to their own sovereigns. Those worthy of this knowledge would grasp it; those unworthy would find these lessons as meaningless as slapstick comedy. Whatever benefits Sun Tzu gained personally from this knowledge were obtained solely as a result of bringing value to others.
Sun Tzu wrote,

“War is of vital importance to the state; hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.”

These words were written during the “Spring and Autumn Period” of China, thought of as a long transitional period between eras of dynastic unity and stability. In Sun Tzu’s time, he was of one of seven states vying for supremacy, dancing on the bones of what had once been a unified Chinese Empire. War was not simply a matter of defending the “Han” people against foreign invasion; Chinese fought Chinese in wars over land, wealth, and influence. Indeed, the rise of the great Chinese philosophies was as a result of brilliant men seeking to escape from the shackles of what they viewed as a sort of permanent quasi-anarchy.
In this “period,” lasting for centuries, war became an inevitability rather than an occasional plague. Previously, armies were led by the retainer thought by the sovereign to be the best suited for the job, strictly on a temporary basis. Thus, with war becoming more regular, an incentive was created for a small class of professional commanders – generals – who would lead the mass conscript armies into battle and increase their odds of success.
Even as the men themselves were conscripts, Chinese warfare already featured the chariot – mentioned in Sun Tzu’s writings but soon abandoned in favor of more conventional cavalry – and crossbows, even at a time centuries before the birth of Julius Caesar, even before the army of Alexander the Great brought the Persian Empire low and advanced as far as India before turning back. Armies were highly sensitive to morale; desertion was a constant fear which Sun Tzu spent a significant number of words addressing, seeking to use generalship and circumstances to reduce this ill as much as possible rather than simply crack the whip more.
This is the context in which Sun Tzu wrote the above introduction. To him, war was not the health of the state; war was the potential death of the state, a cataclysm similar to a national heart attack that needed a general to perform CPR and save the nation from defeat and collapse. Even in “victory,” survival usually meant a massive expenditure of men and materiel that impoverished the entire society, making observations better suited to Adam Smith than Napoleon.
Thus, in modern terms, Sun Tzu was wholly motivated by a single objective encompassing his entire strategy: delivering value to his stakeholders. To Sun Tzu, this meant to bring victory in the quickest, least bloody, least expensive, least ruinous manner possible. However, recognizing that ideals of victory that he held, such as winning without fighting, were most difficult to achieve in the real world, Sun Tzu devoted himself to understanding the variables of warfare (in this sense, his “constants” are not things that remain unchanged; they are rather, things that vary enormously, but which must be examined without fail or exception), the strategies that bring about victory, the fallibility of man, the blending of offensive and defensive tactics, adaptability to an infinite variety of circumstances with an infinite variety of tactics, and best practices for managing a large organization of human beings.
Sun Tzu’s stakeholders were:

• His sovereign;
• His army;
  
• And the public at large of his nation.

This view of stakeholders was then, and is now, remarkable in its breadth.
Many believed then, and a good many believe now, that someone serving a particular leader should absolutely never regard this as “public service”; the individual serves that specific leader as a retainer, serving at his pleasure and leaving at his whim. Judging “the public” to be an amorphous mass with no single will that cannot and must not be valued anywhere nearly as high as the interests of the sovereign, this manner of retainer seeks to please his sovereign alone, only caring for the public to the extent that this is convenient for the sovereign’s interests. By the same token, the army is viewed as a tool; and if a tool is not used, what good is it? Therefore, the army must be used, period. Furthermore, the army must be used for the maximum advantage of the sovereign without any concern for the public at large.
Sun Tzu recognized this view as short-sighted, politically motivated nonsense. The inter-connectivity of all things – as consistent with his Taoist philosophy – makes plain that the sovereign may be the ruler of the people, but he is dependent upon them; the army may be a tool of the sovereign, yet it is dependent on both the sovereign and the people. Even in an autocratic, monarchical system,  to act without the interests of the people in mind is to act with disregard for the self, even when viewed in an entirely selfish manner. Indeed, even the much-maligned Machiavelli wrote about the good of the people, abandoning notions of republicanism to try and shape good behavior by appealing to the base selfish interests of political princes. (Not that he really succeeded in this.)
Thus, by keeping wars short, by eschewing glory-hound behavior in himself and counseling against it in others, and even by seeking to forage on enemy territory and capture chariots and re-purpose them for his own force, Sun Tzu acted in a manner narrowly tailored to helping those he viewed himself as having an obligation to hold dear to him, even though this assuredly meant delivering death, destruction and plunder to neighboring states. Even here, Sun Tzu sought to end wars quickly and with a minimum of fighting so as to minimize the damage to neighboring states, for what is the point of destroying the village to save it? …Particularly if it’s your sovereign who’s going to rule that village. It’s more like, “If you buy it, make sure not to break it.”
When Sun Tzu narrowed “The Art of War” to, well, the art of war, he knew exactly who his stakeholders were; he did not over-extend himself in trying to speak as to philosophy, economics, or other things. He dealt narrowly with what his specialty was, and in that supposedly narrow niche, discovered and propagated knowledge that can only be considered vast, flowing like a vast river rich in natural bounty. In doing so, Sun Tzu was not “simple,” but rather, concise; his writings contained vast knowledge boiled down to the minimum number of strokes on papyrus or cuts into a bamboo strip as required to convey it to those capable of absorbing the knowledge.
In seeking to learn from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” you should ask yourselves the following questions.

• Who are your stakeholders?
• Which stakeholders take top priority?
• How inter-connected are your stakeholders?

This will assist you in assessing what is of vital importance to your stakeholders. After all, if you are managing a corporation, you would clearly regard your shareholders as those you are directly responsible to; yet your shareholders are indirectly dependent upon your relationship with your customers. Hence, to paraphrase Sun Tzu, customer relations are of vital importance to the modern corporation; on no account must they be neglected. When you understand how the idea works, this phrasing not only sounds good – it actually means something to you.
Or, to use my old adage from my time as a Japanese to English translator: Context is King. Really, all strategy is about putting things in proper perspective.
Like all good Asian ideas, it’s short and concise, it sounds simple, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds. It is also, like all good Asian ideas, richly rewarding, a river full of life and bounty, drawn from many tributaries but flowing with the force of a single unifying idea.
This is the essence of all strategy.

Art of Planning

Sun Tzu wrote,

“Now, the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought.”

Note that in Sun Tzu’s time, temples, being large buildings full of noble purpose, were employed as military headquarters on the eve of marching out to campaign, so this is where plans were formed or at least, finalized.

“The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. “

This principle is easily summarized as: winners plan ahead. Even if winners are prepared to alter their plans according to circumstances, they nonetheless make plans to begin with; and all making of plans begins with a careful assessment of all the circumstances forming the background of a conflict.
To wit:

The Moral Law: The motivating factor behind unified collective action; the strength of overall leadershp.
Heaven: The times and seasons, the weather factors, the broad, over-arching environmental factors.
Earth: The specifics of the terrain as they apply to field operations.
The Commander: Who leads what force? What is his or her nature, or adaptability to circumstances?
Method and Discipline: Which side is more organized and better supplied? How strong is the organization?

These are the “Five Constants” of warfare as judged by Sun Tzu, being factors which must be assessed at the outset of any conflict to shed light on the relative strengths of both sides. After all, only a fool plans against an opponent with strength clearly superior to his own in the exact same manner as an opponent with strength weaker than his own. Also, it’s not just about the aggregate level of strength; it’s who is responsible for these strengths and weaknesses, what they are in detail, where those strengths and weaknesses lie, when those strengths are in effect, and thus, as a result of the preceding, why advantages or disadvantages exist. Only with this knowledge can strengths be evaded and weaknesses exploited in an intelligent, systematic manner.
A higher level of wisdom is to understand that the point of planning is not the formation of the plan. (I realize this will seem highly counter-intuitive.) The point of planning is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of both sides in this level of detail. This being done, the strategist can depart from the plan on the basis of knowledge, not ignorance.
“Knowing yourself” and “knowing your enemy” was not some sort of abstract Taoist mysticism to Sun Tzu; he was a general, not a philosopher. He wanted to know himself, and his enemy, in concrete terms of direct relevance to planning for victory in the most effective and efficient manners possible. Only by rationally assessing reality as it is, not as one wishes for it to be, can a person develop a strategy that has a firm basis. In this way, even if the means are not part of philosophy themselves, the end result feels like an extension of natural law.
After all, Sun Tzu counseled to be like water, following the path of least resistance, yet striking with the force of a raging torrent. This is the result of not so much the plan, as the depth of the knowledge that was obtained in the formation of one.

Art of Deception

Some would call the title of this post the “most quoted” quote of Sun Tzu’s entire book. However, I dislike the emphasis many place on learning “The Art of War” through disjointed quotations. Chapter I has a significant section on deception, but readers of this isolated quote might never learn the context associated with it. Allow me to explain.
When Sun Tzu elaborates on deception, he begins:

“Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable;
When using our forces, we must seem inactive;
When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away;
When far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

A reader might glance over this and be tempted to remark, “Well, that sounds easy.” It most assuredly is not.
When in a conflict against fellow human beings, the opponent is a fellow man; being a fellow man, he is familiar with the patterns that accompany readiness to attack, signs of inactivity, and indications of proximity or lack thereof. These are signs that armies and other large organizations give off without conscious thought or effort. While not every leader or strategist is well versed with the subtleties that accompany them, they are all familiar with the bold strokes that accompany an armored cavalry thrust from a General Patton, as one example. These are things that are hard to conceal, yet easy to detect.
Thus, something more is required. This is the role of deception.
Unable to simply show the enemy nothing, the strategist instead shows his opponent something that the opponent wishes to see and wishes to believe. Having shown something, but having shown this something in a way that creates a false impression, the enemy is seduced into deceiving himself.
I should point out right now that Sun Tzu, a man who strenuously preached the importance of benevolence and sincerity in a commander’s personal dealings – not only with his peers and his sovereign, but spies and others in uniquely vulnerable positions where trust is a greater commodity than money – in no way supported deception as a way of life in general. He supported the use of deception in war. This is a critical distinction.
Sun Tzu continued,

“Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

Why feign disorder? Feigning disorder works because of a simple, time-honored principle: if you look like a sucker, someone is going to try and “sucker punch” you. This is also true in martial arts. A skilled martial artist who deliberately puts up a false front, pretending to be “slow” – mentally as well as physically – and to be quiet and passive, can lure an aggressive, careless opponent into making a first move in a careless manner that leads to a thorough beating. Such things have been known to happen. This reaction – seeing weakness, and pouncing on it – is deeply ingrained “alpha male” behavior.
If the opponent attempts to exploit a false opening, it is he who becomes exposed.

“If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is superior in strength, evade him.”

Against an opponent who is secure in defense, the best strategy may well be to await the opponent’s attack. When the opponent leaves his secure position to do battle, he may then be assaulted. However, if the opponent is superior in strength to you, you are not obligated to do him any favors and fight him on terms favorable to him; indeed, much of Sun Tzu’s strategy is devoted to not fighting on terms favorable to the enemy, but to fight on terms favorable to you. Thus, an enemy superior in strength can be evaded.
As we can see, Sun Tzu constantly sees delivering value to his stakeholders as the objective of his strategy. SunT zu does not seek fame or fortune via courage that brings battlefield defeat. Every thought and every action is devoted to fighting war in the most efficient, effective manner possible, seeking to bring it to an end as quicky as possible.

“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.”

Another deeply ingrained alpha male behavior is to take advantage of the weak. If an opponent is weak, he may be treated lightly and with arrogance. Like a cat playing with a mouse, the man in a position of advantage may seek to not only defeat his opponent, but to thoroughly humiliate his enemy in every respect. This search for a more satisfying victory leads directly to carelessness.
Humans naturally do a sort of triage when dealing with threats. If one opponent seems to be weak, that opponent is left aside while the measures are taken against the stronger opponent. (This is a strategy made famous on the reality television series “Survivor.”) When the only opponent on a field of battle seems weak, the tendency of an already prideful man is to boast, “I have no enemy here! I am peerless! This foe is no match of mine! I can defeat him any time I wish!”
By the same token, a man who is attempting to behave in a rational way, but who is prone to bursts of anger, can be provoked into highly aggressive actions (as befit his core nature) if he is sufficiently provoked. Not everyone with a temper can be lured in quite so easily, but those that can be will frequently make careless mistakes.

“If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.”

In the late stages of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, commanders were making decisions when having remained awake constantly over the course of three days. Fatigue – individual and organizational – is one of the leading causes of critical mistakes. Giving the enemy any unnecessary chance to rest and recover his mental strength is unwise. When able to deny the enemy rest, one should do so, for fatigue only makes his job much harder.

“Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected.”

Now we get to the crux of the matter.
Someone learning “The Art of War” as a grouping of isolated quotations and passages would be tempted to read this and believe that it stands wholly on its own. It does not.
Your opponent is unprepared because you have deceived him. He does not expect you because you have irritated him, made him arrogant, and denied him the rest required for him to regain his senses and reconsider his vulnerable position.
When engaged in warfare, every large deception you make is built on every smaller deception you have already made. Having seduced the opponent into deceiving himself as to your strength, disposition, intention, activity, and location, you lead him around calmly and effortlessly as if leading a donkey via a dangling carrot. You show your opponent what he wishes to see, and he decides, purely by himself, that it is so; in this way, you deceive without ever having spoken a word to him, without ever having “lied” in the conventional sense. You have assisted him in lying to himself. Thus, believing his own overconfident conclusions, he is completely at your mercy.
Thus can superiority in numbers and other measurements of strength be brought low, purely due to recognizing that an army is led by a falliable human being.
Finally…

“These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.”

I summarize this passage with a simple quote: Do not tip your hand.
Having entered through all this trouble to deceive one’s opponent, to tip one’s hand and announce one’s tactics to the enemy via word, deed, or spy, is not only fatal to deception, but ruinous because this allows the enemy to develop successful countermeasures. One does not have to lie to not tip one’s hand; the leader merely requires discipline to keep his cards close to the vest rather than flaunt them for all to see. Thus is secrecy preserved.
Thus is victory won where defeat would otherwise be certain. By the same measure, thus is a crushing victory won obtained, routing the enemy with less loss to one’s own side, rather than a narrow, hard-fought victory that could have been obtained through brute force alone.
This is how maximum value is delivered to stakeholders via the most efficient use of resources possible.

Reality must intrude

Sun Tzu wrote,

“According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one’s plans.”

Consider that this phrase emerges in a chapter on the laying of favorable plans for victory. Consider that generals throughout history, in times both modern and ancient, are reluctant to change their plans after having committed to them. Furthermore, changing one’s plans is usually interpreted by others as a sign of weakness, lack of preparation, and even laziness and stupidity. To alter the direction of a large organization is to encourage disorder in the ranks, lack of faith in the leadership at the top, and presents a muddled picture to stakeholders large and small.

Such considerations were not invented in modern times. If a general altered his plans, word of it would surely get back to the advisers of the sovereign; the general’s political enemies would pounce upon the change as a sign of unsteady leadership, hinting – or perhaps lobbying – that a change in command should take place so that someone else can have a turn at either implementing the original plan, or at forming a new plan without the taint of unsteadiness.

Why, then, does Sun Tzu write this?

Sun Tzu’s primary focus and overriding goal was to deliver value to his stakeholders: his sovereign, his soldiers, and the civilian population that sustained both his sovereign and his soldiers through taxation, which is simply a word for appropriating the labor and hard-earned money of the public. He was not in public service as a military professional for glory or the sake of history. He did not put blinders over his eyes. He saw, through the experiences of others as well and his own, a simple, salient fact:

Reality must intrude.

Even if one can be said to have a perfect plan, there can still be imperfect circumstances. To be so devoted to one’s plan as to never change it;  so in love with it, so wedded to it that it must never be altered in any way: this is to flagrantly ignore reality. War, among other activities, takes place in the real world, not on a chessboard. To lose a match at chess is to temporarily lose a few pawns until the next game. To lose in war means for many soldiers to die. To lose may even result in an entire state perishing. As Sun Tzu was well aware of, the dead cannot be brought back to life.

Sun Tzu’s message is to never be so committed to your plan that you are unprepared and unwilling to depart from your plan to take advantage of a genuine opportunity for victory that you did not, or could not, anticipate. Nor should the leader be unwilling to depart from his plan to avoid some great disaster that otherwise awaits him. To do otherwise is to allow stubbornness and recklessness to rule the self and condemn others to misery and loss. That is the opposite of delivering value to one’s stakeholders.

This also applies to “The Art of War” itself: never be so mesmerized by even this wonderful, rich book into thinking that it shall help you form plans that cannot and should not ever be altered according to circumstance. That would be wasting an important message from the original author.

Reality must intrude upon all plans. The wise strategist sees this as an opportunity.

Method and Discipline

Sun Tzu refers to “method and discipline” as the fifth constant, which refers to two separate things.
First, there is the process by which the organization is managed; this includes logistics, the science of getting resources from where they are gathered to where they are needed most, in addition to the process of communicating instructions and receiving feedback to manage the organization effectively.
Second, there is discipline, which is how the people are managed. For this, I will proceed directly to the passage that follows.
“In which army is there greater constancy, both in reward and punishment?”
Our modern world holds a common saying that reads: “No good deed shall go unpunished.” When an organization not only lets good behavior go unrewarded, but in effect, rewards bad behavior by its employees and managers, the effect is cancerous, crippling operations by removing the incentive for the rank and file to report problems up the chain of command, act on their own initiative to mitigate or eliminate problems before they become critical, and creating long-term resentment against the commander or executive’s leadership. This is a poor way to handle an organization.
As with taxes, punishing good behavior will result in less of it; rewarding good behavior will result in more of it. However, both rewards and punishments must be seen as consistent, or they will not be considered fair. A leader who is strict, but fair, will be respected where one who is indulgent or biased will not be. Even if a leader is loved, because he is liberal with rewards, a lack of consistency in enforcing his rules and punishing violations thereof will lead to contempt, and the organization can then be compared to a group of spoiled children, unfit for any practical purpose.
However, should a leader treat his subordinates with respect, rewarding the behavior he wishes to encourage with benevolence, sincerity, wisdom, and above all, consistency, he will not only be respected, but trusted and admired. This is a certain path to victory.

The Commander

“The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage, and strictness.”
Those accustomed to believing Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was the only work on strategy read in older times may find these words surprising; worse, they may assume such words to be hypocritical nonsense. However, Sun Tzu was quite serious: how a Commander, or one acting in a similar capacity, treats his enemies, should not have any bearing on how he treats those he counts as subordinates, peers, allies, and sovereigns.
To be wise is not to constantly seek to impress others with one’s wisdom; it is to speak with the words that are necessary. To be sincere is not to reveal all of one’s secrets; it is to be truthful with what one does say. To be benevolent is not to be soft; it is to act in the best interests of others in the long run, rather than for short-term gain. To be brave is not to be reckless; it is to discard useless fear and hesitation to take advantage of the critical moment. To be strict is not to be cruel; it is to ensure that one’s instructions are obeyed, so that the Commander’s words are treated with respect and not contempt, and for the organization to function effectively.
Those who are deficient in these virtues are not guaranteed to fail. However, they are making implementing their strategies more difficult by sowing doubt and dissent. Only by building trust, communicating effectively, and having a well-founded reputation that inspires respect, can a leader truly use his organization in a dynamic and effective manner.
Above all, the Commander should separate war from peace and never conflate the two. His enemies should know how he treats his friends, and his friends should know how he treats his enemies; in this manner, his friends will not want to become his enemies, yet his enemies, will wish to become his friends.

Earth

“Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death.”
And so, “Earth” represents the terrain.
“Earth” represents the details of the environment that may change greatly, even over a short distance. Ignorance of these details courts disaster.
When real estate agents speak of the three factors affecting the value of a piece of land as “location, location, location,” they are speaking of “the Earth.” When Chinese house hunters recoil in horror at a property because a street is aimed directly at the front of the house perpendicular to that which runs in front of the house, thus bringing evil directly to the front door according to feng shui, this is a consideration of “the Earth.” However, this does not mean physical terrain alone.
There is a different kind of terrain: the human terrain. Humans vary greatly from place to place, and even from individual to individual; it is in-depth knowledge of the differentiations between people, their thinking processes, their actions, and their deeper human nature, that provides the strategist with a great advantage.  Everyone can see what is on the surface; the strategist looks deeper to see what is intangible, invisible to the naked eye.
Thus does the strategist find advantage where others do not.