Strategy
Like all of the Ways, The Way of Strategy cannot be learned through academic study; it must be grokked through life experience. Reading a book on strategy will not make you a strategist, juat as owning a hammer will not make you a carpenter. Strategy is an applied science; it is a skill, like karate, woodworking, or playing the guitar. Strategy is more than something you read about, it is something that you do, and to fully understand strategy, it must become a part of you, as you must become a part of it. Like all of the Ways, the Way of Strategy is a path that you must ultimately walk alone, but there are a few masters who are willing to help point the way.
The Art of War
Among the earliest treatises on strategy was The Art of War, by Sun-tzu (544?-496? BCE), which reduced the discussion of warfare into its most abstract and generalized form. In doing so, it ceased to discuss warfare, per se, and it became a treatiste on the nature of conflict itself. The Art of War provides a series of general guidelines that are useful for anyone who experiences any sort of conflict in their lives -- which is to say, everyone. The Art of War contains simple, but timeless, wisdom that can apply to running a small business, winning a high school football game, and dealing with cliques of mean girls just as easily as it applies to fistfights, resistance cells, or world wars.
The teachings presented in The Art of War mesh so well with everyday life in a modern world because, ironically, Sun-tzu advocates non-violence. (Case and point, the chapter on scorched earth tactics is mostly spent trying to talk the reader out of using scorched earth tactics.) According to Sun-tzu, the ideal strategy is to cultivate a position which is so secure that the enemy has no choice but to surrender. Barring that, you are to physically and spiritually wear your enemies out, to coax them into quitting. Conflict is presented as being expensive and unproductive. The real goal is to win, not to fight. Enemies are to be assimilated, not destroyed, so you can take their strength and grow stronger and stronger. If conflict is unavoidable, then attacks should be limited to surgical strikes directed at the enemy’s weakest spots.
The Art of War consists of a series of brief, expository statements, which were expanded upon by various commentators throughout history While profound, Sun-tzu can be difficult to fully understand; Sun-tzu's statements are often vague, obtuse, and mysterious. This makes sense, as much of his book is devoted to the benefits of being formless and mysterious. However, this also makes Sun-tzu difficult to learn from. This is why we have not posted the full text of his work; instead, we provide a “Cliff’s Notes” for this ancient text; a “Schaum’s Outlines” for dealing with conflict. The distilled essence of the principles Sun-tzu was trying to teach rendered in a standard English prose can be found [The Art of War | here].
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
A key component to understanding the Way of Strategy is to understand the use of stratagems. A stratagem is different from a strategy. A strategy is an overall gameplan; whereas a stratagem is just a deception or dirty trick used to gain an advantage. Using a variety of stratagems is part of a larger, overall strategy. Although many readers will initially reject the use of deception to achieve one’s goals, I can guarantee that at least some of these stratagems will be used against you at some point in your life, so ignore them at your peril.
Fortunately, the multitude of possible stratagems has been distilled, polished, and codified into another ancient Chinese classic, The Thirty-Six Stratagems. The identity of the original author of The Thirty-Six Stratagems is a point of contention among sinologists and historians; the answer to which has probably been lost to history. The Thirty-Six Stratagems are typically attributed to either Sun-tzu, or to Zhuge Liang (181-284 CE), a famous general whose exploits were featured in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, even if Sun-tzu never wrote The Thirty-Six Stratagems in ink, then he wrote them in spirit. These stratagems were either directly discussed in The Art of War, or they are immediate derivable from its teachings. The Chinese equivalent to the English proverb “he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day” is “of thirty-six stratagems, retreating is best.” (“Thirty-six” is a Chinese colloquialism for “a large number of things,” much like how an English speaker would say “a million.”) So, in a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, the original author of these stratagems made sure that their list contained exactly thirty-six items, and had retreating be one of them.
The original author of the Thirty-Six Stratagems reduced each teaching down to a single phrase or proverb, as a mnemonic. Mnemonics were critical to propagate ideas in ancient and medieval societies. When basic literacy was a luxury reserved for privileged classes, rote memorization had to become the primary method for learning. However, these mnemonics only make sense within the cultural framework in which they were originally created. This, like all concepts, is best explained by an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. In the episode “Darmok,” the Enterprise and her crew meet aliens with an entirely metaphor-based language. Although the crew of the Enterprise was equipped with a universal translator, it could only produce word salads. (“The river Temarc, in winter! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”) Although it could translate the individual words, the universal translator could not grasp the overall meaning of the phrases. A Western reader, who is largely unfamiliar with Chinese language, culture, history, and literary traditions, would be unable to understand that “besiege Wei to rescue Zhao” means “to find the Achilles’ heel.” Likewise, the average Chinese person, who was raised in a culture free of idiomatic references to The Iliad, would unable to understand what an Achilles’ heel is.
I have attempted to translate the essence of each stratagem, to make them easy for a Western reader to immediately understand, along with a brief explanation of how they are used. While The Art of War is intended to be an in-depth study of the nature of conflict itself, The Thirty-Six Stratagems are intended to be more of a “cheat sheet.” The stratagems are organized into a decision tree of “if-then” statements to provide quick responses to six common situations.
If you are reading a book about strategy and the acquisition of power, it is probably because you feel weak or powerless on some level. The only real way to overcome feelings of powerlessness, is to acquire power. As Sun-tzu and I will show you, you’ve probably had everything you’ve needed to gain that power all along. You just need to understand what power truly is.
The Way and the Power
Out of print.
