Offensive Strategy!
This chapter is one of my favorites, as it is absolutely chock full of strategic goodness:
- Take your enemy intact whenever possible.
- “Attack an enemy’s strategies” first, then disrupt alliances, then—and only then—fight.
- Fight the fights you can win… in the way you can win: when you’re much bigger, surround the enemy. When you’re double the size, divide the enemy. When evenly matched, engage, when smaller, be capable of withdrawing.
- One way for a leader to ensure ruin for his team: micromanage. (Technically, get involved in the administration of processes the leader knows nothing about.)
But the big whammy from chapter 3? To know yourself and your enemy is to never fear 1,000 battles. To know yourself but not your enemy, is to win and lose in equal measure. To know neither yourself nor your enemy, is to be in peril in every battle.
(Interestingly, Sun Tzu doesn’t even talk about knowing your enemy but not yourself, which I see a lot of these days: well trained professionals who can slice and dice their surroundings, but who fail to look in the mirror.)
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This is one of the meatier and more accessible chapters in Art of War. The main concept of “attacking plans” is quickly grasped, easily applied and has huge implications for anyone in a competitive endeavor.
Once we get out of the instinctive mindset of meeting force with like force, we can see that the objective is to render an enemy ineffective by depriving him of resources, morale, support and motivation. When we attack his plan, we strike at the core of his belief that he can prevail.
My take on the last bit is that I don’t believe it is possible to know your enemy and not know your self. Our enemies are defined by who we are. If you are that vapid and devoid of self knowledge, you do not have enemies. Enmity requires sentience – and what you are left with is a simple predator/prey relationship.