Stratagem #1: According to the enemy (Sun Tzu Series)

This is the first post in my Sun Tzu Stratagems series.

Stratagem #1: According to the enemy

As I noted in the prefacing post of this series, John Boyd was heavily influenced by Eastern cultures, especially classical Taoism and Zen. In Chinese philosophy, there’s well-known concept of yin yang and it is used to describe how seemingly opposing forces are interdependent in the natural world.

Wikipedia gives the following description for the relationship between yin and yang^[1]:

The relationship … is often described in terms of sunlight playing over a mountain and in the valley. Yin (literally the ’shady place’ or ‘north slope’) is the dark area occluded by the mountain’s bulk, while yang (literally the ’sunny place’ or ’south slope’) is the brightly lit portion. As the sun moves across the sky, yin and yang gradually trade places with each other, revealing what was obscured and obscuring what was revealed.

Yin-yang is an active concept. Yin and yang are opposing forces or qualities, they are rooted together, they transform each other and they are balanced, a dynamic equilibrium. However, yin-yang is not an actual substance or force, as it is usually often mistakenly conceived in western terms. It’s a universal way of describing interactions and interrelations between natural forces of the world.

Sun Tzu and yin-yang

Sun Tzu took the concept that yin and yang can transform each other and made the assumption that one can shape the opponent through the principle of ‘according to the enemy’. This principle requires foreknowledge (foresight, knowledge of the environment or battlefield) and cohesion of one’s forces in order to effectively shape the opponent and to orient and adapt oneself to the situation and the environment. Every situation has its give and take, and can be turned into an opportunity.

For example, when Sun Tzu talks about maneuvering armies in the battle, he says^[2]

“Whenever the terrain has impassable ravines, natural enclosures, natural prisons, natural traps, natural pitfalls and natural clefts, you should leave quickly and not get near them. For myself, I keep away from these, so that opponents are nearer to them; I keep my face to these so that opponents have their backs to them.” — Sun Tzu

This resembles the foreknowledge that a commander must have so that he can effectively position his forces for combat and shape the opponent by positioning its forces in disadvantageous position.

According to the competition – what it means in business context?

How can this stratagem be applied to business context? According to the competition might mean that a business is able to 1) observe the competition and the markets, 2) orient and position itself to act according to competitors’ position and actions, and therefore 3) shape the competitors’ environment and markets.

As in war and on the battlefield, being successful in #1 and #2 requires a wealth of foreknowledge and very good foreknowledge gathering capabilities. Get up to speed with the megatrends happening in the world and trends happening in your markets. You need to study your competitors’ offerings closely by researching their marketing and sales efforts, material and methods. Buy their products and services to find out how their order management cycle, production and delivery processes, and customer service works and operates, and where they fall short of excellence.

Once you’ve done this, do the same thing on your own company. At least observe your company’s order management cycle to find out how customers will experience buying from you or try to think through the processes that customers see, experience and interact with.

Last, observe successful businesses outside your market or field. Try to get another point of view on a particular business subject, to broaden your view of the ways of doing business. For example, the “best practice” or the way of doing business in sales in your field might not be the optimal one, and someone else in totally different industry might have methods or practices that will blow your competition out of the water once you adapt them.

Boyd talked about doctrines and how everybody seems to have a doctrine – the German doctrine, the Air Force doctrine, the Army doctrine. He argued that one cannot have or adopt only one doctrine but one must study them all. Then one isn’t captured by any one doctrine, can pull ideas and practices out of any doctrine, form a synthesis and do better than anybody else. Boyd also argued that doctrine is a doctrine on Day One, but becomes a dogma every day after. Therefore, you need to constantly challenge the assumptions, the “best practices” and the standard way of doing things in your industry and field of business.

“Because if you have got only one doctrine, you are a dinosaur.” — John Boyd

After you’ve gathered the intelligence, analyze your competitors and your own company side by side, pick out the remarkable components that will give your business an edge and form a synthesis from these to create an offering, business model or a process that’s superior than your current one. Now you’ve completed the observation and orientation parts of the OODA loop.

Now you can shape your competition and the markets by (deciding and) acting on the foreknowledge you’ve accumulated. By accelerating your OODA looping to faster pace than your competition, you can start putting the competition on their toes and forcing them to accepting positions that they would not like taking. The rapid pace of change or advancement lets you orient and start acting on the next thing when your competition is scrambling to respond to your previous move.

This might mean doing product or service innovation at very rapid pace, incrementally and iteratively bringing small batches of new value into your value chain all the time. Let’s call it Innovation Blitzkrieg, a phenomenon where you’d delight your customers on a daily or weekly basis by visibly improving your offering by adding new value and constantly communicating with them how they experience the new offering and how you should develop it even further. Once you start doing this, your competitors are quickly seen as laggards, trying to play catch-up and look up to you for driving the innovation in your industry. Don’t pile large chunks of new value into “new releases” of your product or service, but immediately increase the value of your offering by bringing the new value to the market as soon as you can reliably deliver it most of the time.

That’s it for stratagem number one. I might have stepped off track for a while there, but as I’m thinking these through, it seems that many of Sun Tzu’s and John Boyd’s stratagems and concepts are so intertwined that picking out just one and trying to analyze just that one seems to be nigh impossible.

Next up, Foreknowledge.

References:

1. Wikipedia: Yin and yang
2. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, p. 173

Tags: Stratagems, Strategy, Sun Tzu