Sun Tzu’s Stratagems

Recently I’ve started researching Frans P.B. Osinga’s excellent book Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. John Boyd was a USAF fighter pilot and military strategist, whose theories have been highly influential in the military and in business, although very few people (seem to) have heard about Boyd. I’ll be writing a lot about Boyd and his material in the future but meanwhile you can check out Wikipedia’s article on him if you want to get heads-up on whom I’m going to talk about.

But back to the book. Osinga talks about Sun Tzu, whose name many people recognize and associate him as the author of The Art of War, an ancient Chinese book on military strategy. According to Osinga, Sun Tzu must be considered to be the true conceptual, albeit ancient, father of Boyd’s work^[1]. Boyd was heavily influenced by Eastern cultures, especially classical Taoism and Zen. In the book, Osinga fleshes out ten stratagems^[2] that influenced Boyd and lead him to incorporate them into his thinking and theories.

These stratagems are:

1. According with the enemy
2. Foreknowledge
3. Cohesion
4. Surprise
5. Deception and deceit
6. Formlessness and being unfathomable
7. High tempo
8. Variety and flexibility
9. Orthodox and unorthodox
10. Vacuous and substantial

My journal was filling up page after page of notes while I studied and reflected on these stratagems. While these ideas and concepts were originally conceived for describing strategy and nature of war, with a little bit of analysis and synthesis I think these can be applied to business world. While war is a concentrated form of human struggle against environment^[3], so is running a business even though we’re not defeating nations and killing human beings. We as a company are competing against other businesses and ultimately our goal is to defeat other players or diminish the possibility of strong competition.

Reading about these stratagems and how they relate to Boyd’s work inspired me to reflect on these in light of business context and how to use them to play hardball with one’s competition and markets. In other words, how these themes and Boyd’s ideas might work together in business situations and how to get an edge on one’s competition by applying these ideas in one’s business strategy.

I’m going to do a series of blog posts on these stratagems. You’ll find links to each post on this one, so you can get to all of them easily from one page.

• Stratagem #1 According to the enemy (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #2 Foreknowledge (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #3 Cohesion (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagems #4 and #5 Surprise, deception and deceit (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #6 Formlessness and being unfathomable (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #7 High tempo (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #8 Variety and flexibility (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #9 Orthodox and unorthodox (Sun Tzu Series)
• Stratagem #10 Vacuous and substantial (Sun Tzu Series)

I’ll try to write about one per day so you should be reading about stratagem number ten on Christmas Eve.

References:

1. Frans P.B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, p. 35
2. Osinga, p. 38
3. Liddell Hart, Strategy, p. 330

Tags: Stratagems, Strategy, Sun Tzu