By Omar Mohsen Keep It RealThe illuminated palm tree to the right illustrates a key teaching of Machiavelli: Look at the world the way it is, rather than the way you wish it was. By Mohsen Allam Seven BreathsEntrepreneur Ahmed El-Zayat knew when to follow his instinct, and has been laughing his way to the way to the bank ever since. By Mohamed Allouba The Strong will be OvercomeWael Amin beat bigger, better funded, more experienced competition by choosing to compete based on ITWorx’s own strengths, not those of his enemies. By Omar Mohsen The WinnerOrascom Telecom’s Naguib Sawiris knows when to pick his fights and how to win them, two key skills discussed in The Art of War. This ability has made him one of the world’s richest and most influential people.

By Tom Gara

The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese.” The drug-addled reflections of a young man after his first puff of hashish? The catch phrase for a new brand of canned dairy spread? Unfortunately not. This line was one of the key learnings of Who Moved My Cheese?, one of the most popular management / self-help books of the last decade, with over 5 million copies in print.

The entire genre of writing aimed at helping people and businesses work better goes by so many different names — self-help, motivational writing, organizational effectiveness, personal development — that it is hard to pin down exactly where it begins and ends. One thing is for sure, though: If you are looking for ideas that will help you or your business become more effective and successful, there is no shortage of people looking to sell you their ideas. Bookstores overflow with texts outlining thousands of different methods, systems and philosophies on being your best, and an entire industry of motivational speakers, writers, trainers and publishers has developed with the express aim of helping people excel.

Here in Cairo, a cottage industry of consultants, trainers and entrepreneurs has grown around this phenomena, offering courses and seminars based on the teachings of these texts, often localizing the basics to add relevance and context to the Egyptian environment and culture. As far as we know, however, nobody is offering a “Who Moved My Chicken Shawerma” motivational seminar — not yet, at least.

Ideas and writings that have remained powerful for hundreds — or thousands — of years, are likely to be right on the mark

The difficulty, as always, is knowing how to differentiate the truly excellent from the slightly average and the hopelessly bad. Most new books look tempting, with great packaging and rave reviews on the back cover, promising you that this one book is the key to life, the universe and everything. There may be many ways to identify the genuinely good stuff — recommendations from friends, good reviews from credible people — but in the end, there is one absolutely fail-safe way to tell if what you are reading is worth your time. Ideas and writings that have remained powerful for hundreds — or thousands — of years, are pretty likely to be right on the mark.

Compared with most of the stuff available today, the wisdom that we have inherited from our ancestors and the ancients is generally on another level.

Most modern-day management / motivational writing is disposable stuff — catchy, gimmicky waffle, lacking substance, written by opportunistic con artists who know an easy dollar when they see it. Get yourself a fancy title from a degree-mill university, whiten your teeth and blow-dry your hair, and before you know it, you too can be raking in the dollars for your “Seven Secrets” or “Five Steps”-style gibberish. The only thing more shameful than the average management book and its ‘entrepreneurial’ author is the fact that these things sell in the hundreds of thousands and routinely attract hordes of followers, desperate to feel connected to some new, until-now-undiscovered route to unimaginable success.

On the other side are the semi-spiritual guides to life, authored with much influence from the New Age ideals of Do-It-Yourself spirituality. Probably the most contemptible of all this trash is The Secret, a smash hit “documentary” that purports to share with its viewers a secret that “has traveled through centuries to reach you.” This “secret” is, essentially, positive thinking, and the stunningly insightful revelation that positive thinking is generally better than negative thinking.

“Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated.”

According to the producers of The Secret, by simply visualizing what you want — say, a shiny new laptop — asking the universe for it and believing that you will get it, a new laptop will magically come to you. All you have to do is ask and believe. And forget all about reality, and the big, wide, absolutely real world in which you live. Get up and do something about it? Forget about it. The key is to believe. The fact that this nonsense — essentially Santa Claus for grown-ups — has legions of faithful practitioners across the word speaks volumes about the state of modern-day thinking.

Thinking like this has so infected mainstream culture that it is often difficult to tell where the line is drawn. At a conference in London last year, attended by business and social leaders from across Europe, I was interested to see water jugs ‘labeled’ with positive sounding words like “energy” and “clarity” written in big red letters. I asked an organizer what was going on — the reply was both simple and frightening. You see, it had been conclusively proven that by writing such words on the water jugs, their positive energy is transferred to the water, and therefore, on to the lucky drinker.

One presumes this same person would not be too happy coming home to find their fridge missing, replaced by a cardboard box with the word “cooling” written on it in felt-tip pen.

The best you can ever do is make the most of the present moment.

It’s not just that this new-age, pseudo-scientific bunk doesn’t work — who are we to judge the merits of ideas that might be just as effective as placebo remedies? It’s probably true that if you believe, to the bottom of your heart, that surrounding your bed with healing crystals and sleeping in orientation with distant solar systems helps make you strong, then doing so will help you feel and act strong. No, the problem with this school of thinking is that it represents a slap in the face to thousands of years of genuine human wisdom and learning. The long, proud march of human history has been characterized by the emergence of hundreds of different schools of thought, each of them reaching a pinnacle of excellence and clarity with certain thinkers, writers and movements.

With this ocean of wisdom available to learn from, why flop around in a kiddie pool filled with Diet Cola?

There is a reason why the teachings of people like Confucius are still studied now, almost 2,500 years after his death. When knowledge passes the test of time on such a scale, you can be pretty sure that it contains some learnings that cannot be compared to the kind of stuff that will be on the discount shelves in six months. In recognition of the wise men of old, and as a not-completely-undeserving poke in the eye to the worst of modern-day thought, we have put together a collection of some of the best old-school wisdom. This stuff has worked — across generations, cultures and ages — making people, businesses and nations successful.

If you think that this stuff might lack value in the here and now, think again. We know for a fact of two groups of top decision makers —one in private sector, the other in government —who meet independently of each other to read and discuss Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Why? They plan on using the lessons of the 2,500 year-old treatise on warcraft to shake things up in the stagnant power structures in which they find themselves. And isolated idea? It seems not: The groups don’t share a single connection (other than knowing us, that is). If such wisdom can bring change to organizations as monolothic as theirs, there are no excuses for the average business person not to do the same in their companies and lives.

When it comes to classical wisdom that remains as relevant today as ever, it has to start with Machiavelli. Just as a solid Italian menu has to include pasta, a look at the learnings of old that have resonance today would be useless without taking into account the man behind The Prince.

Niccolo Machiavelli was born on the outskirts of Florence in 1469, during a chaotic, tumultuous period in Italian history. The country was divided into a number of small city-states, ruled by monarchs who constantly shifted alliances between each other and foreign powers. It was a time of frequent wars, deception and conflict. It was also, in contrast, a time when great new thinking flooded the land — the Italian Renaissance saw unprecedented cultural and intellectual growth, with great thinkers and artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo reviving classical notions of art and scholarship that had been in decline through the dark ages.

In the middle of all this was the great Machiavelli, who became a seasoned Florentine diplomat and politician, leading armies and negotiating with foreign powers, mastering the art of statecraft. Upon his retirement, he wrote The Prince, a classic treatise on power — how to gain it, how to use it, and how to retain it. His ideas were among the most influential in history, and are still cited today by leading politicians and businessmen as timeless examples of how to succeed.

Machiavelli’s realistic, pragmatic approach to the politics and mechanics of power and influence is one of the cornerstones of the modern school of realism in international relations. Realism states that nations are, at their core, motivated primarily by the desire for power and security, rather than any loftier notions of ethics or morality. The writings of Machiavelli are, however, equally informative for use in both business and life, particularly when dealing with power politics.

“It appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live. He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.”

This is, in essence, the core of realism. In business, this means looking at both your own organization and your external environment — competitors, customers, government — as they really are, not how they should be or how you wish they were. Although it is certainly useful to have a vision of how things should be — and to try and make that vision a reality — what is more important is to understand the current reality. How many times have you seen a company release a product that clearly has no market? No amount of wishful or idealistic thinking can change the fact that people don’t want, or can’t afford, what you are trying to sell them. Does anyone remember the company in 2002-03 with the genius idea to replace Cairo’s streetlights with Dubai-style illuminated plastic palm trees? Despite the fact that they were a roaring (if brief) success in the Gulf, few were surprised when these pointless, expensive, superficial frills didn’t catch on in Egypt.

Another example would be the shopping mall craze of the 1990s. After the success of developments such as the World Trade Center, opportunistic developers started their own mall projects all over the place — not noticing that the nation’s economy was dwindling amidst stagnant growth in incomes and foreign investment. The fact that the market for such malls was miniscule failed to discourage the mall developers, many of whom went broke in the coming years. Idealism and wishful thinking are no replacement for a realistic analysis of how things are.

Equally, expecting your competitors to act in a completely fair, honest, honorable way ignores a central reality of business — that often, people will do whatever it takes to beat the competition. It is better to hold a realistic view of your competitors than to hold a naive one and be constantly surprised and outraged by their actions.

“Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved or feared? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved.”

This statement gives way to a well known saying among managers — “If you want to be loved, buy a dog.” How many times have you seen leaders be so focused on having their people like them — trying to be the cool, popular bosses everyone loves? Of course, being a nice guy is a good idea, but working too hard on coming across as a friend first and boss second will often lead to a manager’s downfall. In reality, it is more important to have people working hard, fearing the consequences of wasting time and underachieving.

If you can create a positive, friendly environment, where people genuinely dread the consequences of poor performance, you are well on your way to being a successful manager. But remember, as Machiavelli went on to say: “Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated.”

It isn’t all about fear and absolute power. Machiavelli’s advice to aspiring princes and power-brokers is as simple as it is challenging, commanding those who aspire to be great to truly step up to the plate:

“Nothing makes a prince so much esteemed as great enterprises and setting a fine example [] And a prince ought, above all things, always to endeavour in every action to gain for himself the reputation of being a great and remarkable man.”

Machiavelli’s 475 year-old masterpiece, The Prince, is now in the public domain, and available online as a free e-text at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1232

The samurai were the military nobility of feudal Japan, existing as fiercely faithful servants to the ruling lords. Although the samurai are well known in popular culture today for their mastery of martial arts, what is less commonly known is that the samurai lived by a strict, all-encompassing code of life that incorporated Japanese and Chinese mythology, Buddhist philosophy (particularly the Zen school of Buddhism favored by the Japanese), Confucianism, and Shinto, the native religion of Japan.

Central to the Samurai way of life, known as Bushido, is an intense focus on devotion — devotion to serving one’s master, retaining one’s honor and perfecting the arts of the samurai. With an extensive influence from East Asian spirituality, Bushido places a high emphasis on clarity of mind, purposeful action and meditative reflection. In the 17th century, during the twilight of Samurai power, samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo engaged in a series of conversations with a young apprentice, where he explained the ‘old way’ — the unspoken moral code of the samurai. The compilation of these conversations was not released until almost 200 years later, when it was released as Hagakure (literally “In the Shadow of Leaves”): The Book of the Samurai.

“One should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Naoshige s When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly. With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgements within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.”

It is often the case that you can see things more clearly in a moment of perception than after many hours of analysis. The argument for the power of instinct was most recently made by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling classic Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The idea is simple: Sometimes too much information and analysis can needlessly cloud our minds, causing us to make bad decisions. Often, to best option is to follow your instinct, and make the most of your immediate senses and feelings, which are often far better informed and accurate than you imagine.

Consider the case of visionary business leader Ahmed El-Zayat. In the mid-1990s, at the height of the Islamist insurgency in Upper Egypt and Cairo, with people across the country embracing increasingly strict religious sentiments and confidence in the government’s economic credentials at a low point, what does he do? He purchases an ailing state-owned alcohol company. Any number of analysts, experts and researchers would be guaranteed to suggest that in that time and place, such a purchase would not be a sound business move. El-Zayat instead trusted his instinct, and the stunning success story that is the turnaround and eventual LE 1.3 billion sale to Heineken of Al-Ahram Beverages Company is a testament to both his instincts and his wisdom in following them.

In business, knowing when to trust your instinct over mountains of information and analysis is incredibly important. As anybody who has ever worked with market research or statistics knows, you can do almost anything with numbers. Often, when we accumulate piles of information, all we are really doing is gathering together documents that support the decision we already want to make. In other times, the process of research and preparation is used to delay making a difficult decision. Knowing when to simply trust your instinct and experience is an incredibly valuable skill for a manager to have — and can often be the key advantage between you and your competitors.

“There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment. Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else. No one seems to have noticed this fact. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience. And once one has come to this understanding he will be a different person from that point on, though he may not always bear it in mind.”

In business and in life, the best you can ever do is make the most of the present moment. This is the difference between spending all day in useless meetings and spending time with your employees. It is the difference between choosing to slack off for that extra half hour because the boss isn’t around, or instead using that half hour to do something truly important. When reading the life stories of the world’s most successful people, it is often this characteristic — making the most of every moment, jumping on small opportunities, never, ever slowing down or giving up — that is the big difference between the greats and everybody else.

This choice — to make the most of the moment — remains a popular sentiment among motivational speakers and authors to this day. Rarely is it articulated as clearly and comprehensively as in the Eastern philosophies that influenced the samurai.

Another aspect of this concept is that of being present. To truly understand the moment requires you to be fully present in that moment, physically and mentally. It is common, and easy, to go through the morning on caffeine-assisted autopilot, the early afternoon in a post-lunch daze, and the final hour of the day simply waiting to leave. What is more difficult is to remain intensely focused throughout the day, awake and aware of everything that is happening, engaged with the topic of every meeting, actively listening to everyone you speak to. Not only will you benefit from making better decisions and learning more from each experience, but those who work with you and meet with you will certainly notice the energy and attention which you focus on your business — again, a major characteristic of the most successful business people.

The Hagakure was the inspiration for, and is heavily quoted in, the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, by Jim Jarmusch. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, is in the public domain, and an e-text is available at http://users.tkk.fi/~renko/hag1.html

Tao (pronounced Dow, literally meaning “the Way” or “the Path”) is the basis of Taoism, a complicated grouping of Chinese philosophical and religious concepts. Although it is difficult to explain Taoism in simple terms, due to its long and complex history, one thing is clear: The philosophical basis of Taoism is expressed most succinctly in the Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way / Path and its Virtue), authored in the 6th century BC by former royal archivist Lao Tzu. According to legend, as Tzu tried to leave the city in an attempt to withdraw from the outside world, the gatekeeper told him he must first write down a record of his wisdom. The resulting book remains one of the most important and influential philosophical texts ever written.

Literally meaning “without action,” the concept of Wu-Wei is central to the Tao Te Ching and Taosim. The idea is simple: It is easier, and wiser, to work with the natural flow of things rather than to fight against it. The martial art Aikido is heavily influenced by this concept, and Aikido masters are experts at using their opponents energy against them. Thus, when you go running at an Aikido master, arms and legs flying all over the place, it is likely that they will, with a gentle flick of the wrist and perfectly controlled movement, use your momentum to send you flying across the room. It is not uncommon to see children, well trained in Aikido, literally throwing fully grown adults three times their weight across the room, hardly even flexing a muscle to do so. This is the strength that is available to those who can recognize and work with the forces around them, rather that needlessly fighting against them.

Applying this concept to business means turning every event into an opportunity to gain an advantage, by capitalizing on the energy or momentum of the moment, as opposed to struggling against it. A piece of bad publicity is an opportunity to react honestly and respectably while in the public spotlight. A senior staff member resigning is an opportunity to demonstrate how much you value existing staff and an opportunity to promote a deserving employee. A negative advertising campaign by a competitor, targeting your company, is a chance to turn the focus on the competition and their negative behavior — an opportunity to contrast your own positive public messages with the negative message of the competition.

Equally, effortless action means focusing on the things that you are best at — as a company and as an individual. Rather than engaging in unnecessary battles and fighting against larger, better funded competition, choose instead to create your own market based entirely on your own strengths. Everybody is brilliant at something, and by choosing to let that something be your main weapon, you will lose far fewer battles.

The example of local technology outsourcing firm ITWorx comes to mind — with a highly skilled talent pool of bilingual Arabic / English speaking technical graduates who also have considerable business acumen (the company employing almost 50% of AUC’s computer science graduates in 2005), the company chose to play to its strengths rather than those of its competitors. Instead of targeting the lucrative multibillion-dollar market of back-office outsourcing currently dominated by Indian firms, ITWorx chose to locate itself higher up the value chain, outsourcing software development projects for multinational giants in the Gulf, the USA and beyond. Their phenomenal success is largely thanks to their keen sense for what it is they are best at.

This verse from the Tao Te Ching explains one of the most simple yet complex tenets of Taosim. Although water may appear to be the softest, most harmless substance, on closer inspection this is not the case. Water dissolves mighty mountains into soft sandy beaches, reshapes entire physical landscapes, and can shift shape to fit into any given container or crevice. The nature of water — fluid, consistent, relentless, eternal — is actually the nature of real strength. How do you break water? Can you smash it with a hammer?

The concept that to be fluid is more powerful than to be made of stone is one which converts easily to business. When responding to a crisis, which company will perform better: the one that changes nothing and remains ‘business as usual,’ or the one that adapts to the situation at hand and continually changes according to the circumstances? And we all know what happens to the tough guy, hard as rock, who struts around acting like the strongest man in the world — he gets in more fights, and is less loved than anyone.

The Tao Te Ching — over 2,500 years old — is in the public domain, and can be read online at http://www.taoism.net/ttc/complete.htm

The Art of War, Sun Tzu’s classic 600 BC treatise on war and strategy, is probably the most widely read book on military strategy ever written. Even to this day, military colleges across the world include the Art of War in their reading lists, with generals still applying its principles in military planning. Famously, the Art of War was used in the planning of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm offensive in Iraq.

Like Machiavelli, Sun Tzu was a realist, and preferred to focus on the world as it was, rather than as it should have been. The Art of War has formed the basis for a number of business books, and many well-known business leaders, political professionals and sports people list it as one of their most influential texts.

Applying the Art of War to business and life requires one simple modification — remember that “war” and “battle” can be looked at as a metaphor for any kind of interaction where two parties — people, businesses, countries — are both trying to achieve their own objectives. Equally, remember that you don’t necessarily battle your enemies, and even if you do, you don’t have to hate your enemies and want them dead. “Enemy” in this sense merely means someone else with their own objectives.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you will win 100 battles out of 100 fought. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will be defeated in every battle.”

Knowing your enemy is vital when it comes to winning the battle. When you are facing a tough competitor, a difficult colleague or a tricky interviewer, the same set of questions are always important to ask yourself. What do they want? What is their most powerful advantage? What is their greatest weakness? What would they want me to do? What do they most fear me doing? Knowing the answer to these kind of questions already gives you one powerful advantage.

Consider Etisalat’s cunning advertising campaign that came with the launch of 3G services in Egypt. Just as Vodafone had flooded the streets with billboards, promoting in huge, Vodafone-red letters, “3G” — and almost no other text on the signs at all — Etisalat had an ingenious reply. After obviously thinking long and hard about how Vodafone would position their service — and maybe getting some insider information along the way — Etisalat came out with almost identical signs, in their own green colors, promoting “3.5G.” Does anyone know what the difference between the two systems really is? No. Is there actually a difference? It’s debatable. Was it a major marketing victory based on smart analysis of the enemy? Absolutely.

Knowing yourself is equally important, particularly when it comes to knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and being clear on your definition of success. People often have little idea of their own weaknesses and how to avoid them becoming a liability. However, knowing your weak points, and having a plan for how to avoid them becoming a vulnerability, is just as important as knowing your strengths. Equally, knowing what you want is vital — once you have achieved your objectives, the battle can be terminated. War is not a pleasant thing, and should only go on for exactly as long as needed for you to achieve your objectives. Any longer and everyone suffers. As Sun Tzu says, “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidly bringing it to a close.”

“You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked.”

This concept, much like the idea of effortless action covered in the Tao Te Ching, is all about the importance of choosing how and where you fight. Instead of expending energy and resources in battles which will cost you dearly and gain you little, it is often better simply to find places where you cannot be defeated, or attack places where you are sure of victory. This is at the heart of the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy, a popular 2005 business book written by Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, from the renowned INSEAD business school in Paris. The concept is that businesses can achieve great success by capturing open, previously untapped markets. By essentially ‘creating’ a market, you make competition irrelevant, and basically define the market by your own product and brand.

It is often the case that crowded, fiercely contested markets are not the best places to be — defined by lower margins, higher customer acquisition costs and less opportunity for rapid growth. By following Sun Tzu’s logic, look for market opportunities that your competitors have yet to exploit, and focus your defensive strategy on your strongest, most competitive areas.

Orascom Telecom’s hostile takeover bid for Raya Holdings, announced in late July, is a prime example of Naguib Sawiris’ finely-tuned sense for winning. Raya was running low on momentum, struggling to convince shareholders that prospects would improve greatly in the foreseeable future. Despite many of its founders and directors holding a large stake in the company (and in no mood to sell), they had a weakened flank — the 55% of the business that was publicly floated and held by a demoralized group of shareholders. It was a company vulnerable to takeover.

Equally, Sawiris and OT ensured that they attacked from their strongest point, which conveniently matched to Raya’s weakest. The company is extremely well capitalized, supported by a bullish group of investors, with enormous growth prospects in telecom markets in Egypt and across the world. If any company could take the struggling Raya and capitalize on its strengths (a strong phone retailing and servicing network, call centers and office facilities) it would be OT. For more information on the OT-Raya hostile takeover bid, see “Nation in Brief,” page 25.

In this issue of Business Today Egypt, we profile a Cairo-based company who has executed the “Blue Ocean” concept perfectly. Speed Send (“Paper, Pens and Profit”, page 46), an upstart office supply business using state-of-the-art internet technology, chose to focus heavily on delivering value added ‘insourced’ services to their clients, providing key analytical and decision-making data that would normally have been the responsibility of managers within their customer companies. The result has been a boom in business, particularly from top-flight multinationals, and the purchase of a 15% stake in the company by a multinational giant of the industry.

This is one lesson that is still largely to be learned by Egyptian entrepreneurs and businesses. Hardly a day goes by without the announcement of a new high-end foreign luxury good or service being brought to Egypt by an enterprising local agent. With all of these premium, top-of-the-line services targeting the wealthiest 2% of the country, there are clearly signs that this market is becoming crowded. Yet the conventional wisdom is that it is the only place to be — regardless of the fact that the other 98% of the market are just as hungry for good products and services.

For Cairo-based managers who want to learn more about the business applications of the Art of War, IMI is running a training in August titled “The Art of War for Managers: Developing a Strategic Plan”. See Agenda, page 82.

Sun Tzu’s Art of War is in the public domain, and an e-text can be downloaded at classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

People like Sun Tzu and Machiavelli came of age in troublesome times, when war was an almost constant backdrop to everyday life. The very existence of states and peoples could depend on success in the battlefield, and with a great loss came the virtual guarantee of misery and suffering for the people. The existential importance of success in battle led to both the intellectual and scientific emphasis on military study; the depth and quality of the wisdom generated continues to inform us to this day.

Reading these works gives a business leader an insight into the learnings of people who fought battles of an intensity and importance far greater than any you will ever face in the boardroom. By studying these great bodies of work, you have a tool at your disposal that transcends trends and management fads — the wisdom of how to win, by people who had no other option.

How can you recreate this sense or urgency and necessity in the boardroom, let alone the factory floor? For businesses in highly competitive markets, the existential threat may be quite similar. Management needs to realize that winning the battle — and the war — means safeguarding the livelihood of employees, as well as improving their own reputations as victorious leaders.

For employees, the costs of corporate war are all too well-known — few working people would be unaware of the layoffs and workplace chaos surrounding a failed business. Having these people understand their unique role as foot soldiers in the battle — a role expanded on in depth by both Sun Tzu and Machiavelli — is an excellent first step. But in the end, the ultimate deciding force in the outcome of battle is the leader — Sun Tzu’s general, Machiavelli’s prince — in the case of your business, you.

It is for exactly this reason that the reader of thinkers such as these needs to keep one simple thought in mind: This isn’t just about winning. If you cannot connect winning individual battles — or even winning the whole war — with a greater sense of good, then why bother fighting them? The wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, the discipline of the Hagakure, the raw strategy of the Art of War and the cunning statecraft of The Prince all have one thing in common — they were written with the aim of inspiring a greater, more comprehensive change in the status quo.

Machiavelli’s reputation for being a ruthless pragmatist — the use of the term “Machiavellian” to describe any act of manipulation or “means-to-an-end” power play continues to this day — is well deserved. However, what is less popularly known of Machiavelli is that when focusing on the most effective means to achieve the end goal, it was the “end” that Machiavelli was truly interested in. Throughout Machiavelli’s writings, there is on ongoing wish for peace and order to rule the land, and a fear that if leaders fail in their statecraft, their people will come under foreign domination, losing both their dignity and freedom. This is, therefore, the real “end” Machiavelli had in mind: for his beloved subjects to live their lives peacefully and in safety.

Thus to be “Machiavellian” in your ruthless acquisition and retention of power is pointless, unless once in power you can achieve something meaningful and long-lasting. Machiavelli shows leaders what is at stake if they fail, instructs them pragmatically on how to succeed, but most of all, commands leaders to fight for something larger and more eternal than their own power and glory.

At its center, the Art of War is really a guide on how to ensure the least possible amount of war. By doing things extremely well, one can keep conflict to a minimum, which is an end in itself — peace at home is peace in the world.

What all these great works of strategy and philosophy tell us is that the purpose, the vision, the end — this is what is truly worth fighting for. If the ruler does not have a bigger picture in their head than simply the next battle, the next competitor, the next promotion, then ruin will come, sooner or later. Who you are, what you believe in, what you want your organization to be — and why you want it to be this way — without this knowledge, you really do have nothing to fight for. And this is the knowledge that does not come from motivational speakers, books (both modern and ancient) or management techniques; it comes from within — and the difference between the good leader and the great will always begin with what is inside.

Luckily for us all, it is ourselves which we have greatest control over, and who we are is our most unique, one-of-a-kind asset. You are the world’s leading, number-one expert on being yourself, which means that the first great battle of your life has already been fought and won.

Onward! bt

Sun Tzu’s five constant factors of war

The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, regardless of danger.

(These are things like values and organizational culture, employee engagement and ownership, and the authority and respect held by the leadership team)

Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.

(This is the external environment, factors beyond the control of either organization)

Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death.

(This represents opportunities and threats, the various competitive advantages of each organization)

The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.

(Leadership)

Method and Discipline is the maintenance of effective command and control structures, proper planning and analysis, financial control and administrative management

1) Who has a better culture and a more empowered leadership team?

2) Who has a better quality of management?

3) Who comes off better after a standard SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis?

4) Which organization has better discipline and focus across all levels of staff?

5) Who is better prepared and better equipped for competition?

6) Which company has better trained, more experience and more qualified staff?

7) Which company has a more consistent reward and recognition program, and which company has better accountability systems?

1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction;

2) Cowardice, which leads to capture;

3) A hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults;

4) A delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame

5) Over-concern for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble

These are the five besetting sins of a general, ruinous to the conduct of war. When an army is overthrown and its leader slain, the cause will surely be found among these five dangerous faults. Let them be a subject of meditation. bt