Abstract: How to infer accurate feedback in ambiguous environments.
Posts tagged as:
Art of War
On your way up the corporate ladder, you are bound to come across “zero sum” situations in which there will be a winner and a loser. When you reach one of these moments, compassion, honor, and self-indulgence will suddenly become luxuries you cannot afford. In a battle for that single open slot, the compassionate candidate can be hurt, the honorable shamed, and the self-indulgent ridiculed.
Just as a cornered army will fight with ferocious desperation, a cornered employee will, too. A humiliated employee will harbor all that frustration, anger, resentment, and fear, and will stew in it until s/he has a chance to throw it back in your face.
Abstract: Applying lessons from Sun Tzu’s _The Art of War_ to improve your hiring process.
Energy: most of your energy is applied “normally” to engaging… but when you are prepared, you find that you can exploit opportunities with extraordinary forces which are like “a grindstone against egg shells.”
One key to this is to understand your people well enough to set the conditions whereby each of them—individually—can excel. The good leader does not “demand” victory, he ensures it by putting people in positions and situations that play to their unique strengths.
Today’s installment goes beyond business and looks at some of the craziness in the world today.
Sun Tzu opens chapter 4, on “Dispositions,” by warning the reader that truly skilled warriers first make themselves invincible, and then await an enemy’s vulnerability.
This one sentence—which remember, is held by many people in many quarters to be part of the most sage collection of military wisdom ever documented—completely undermines the strategic underpinning of Amercia’s current War on Terror.
Abstract: how to fight fights you can win, plus 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.
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