In his recent piece in the New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath: How Underdogs Break the Rules, astronomically best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, whose books The Tipping Point and Blink provided fine examples for The Rules of Victory, uses the example of a grade-school girls’ basketball team strategy to demonstrate how stepping outside the boundaries of accepted approaches can upset the power balance and lead to victory.

In this case, a team of geeky girls with lots of heart but almost no basketball ability were trained to harass their opponents in a relentless full-court press. They became champions. Why, Gladwell asks, doesn’t the full-court press become the norm?

In this case, we find that our hero has not gone far enough in his investigation. For one thing, he is delving into the vast world of asymmetric warfare but doesn’t even mention the idea or any of the discussion or literature around it, which might have caused him to stumble onto the Sun Tzu, which many regard as the guidebook for asymmetric conflicts.

Also, he might have run into the Sun Tzu idea of the orthodox and the extraordinary. The Sun Tzu counsels using the orthodox (the accepted, the inside the box, coloring within the lines) to engage, and the extraordinary (breaking the rules) to attain victory. But critically, the Sun Tzu points out, the extraordinary is never permanently extraordinary.

In other words, if everyone uses the full court press, it will become the norm and the skills will be developed to counteract it, or the rules of the game will be changed to prevent it from becoming a boring contest dominated by defense (cf. hockey’s now-outlawed neutral zone trap or the spitball in baseball or the freeze in basketball, which the 24-second clock eliminated).

The methods of earlier underdogs may not be successfully repeated in the original form. Adversaries will have adapted. The rulemakers will have changed the dimensions of the box one was thinking outside of. The extraordinary has to be discovered anew, otherwise everyone would be doing it. 

Barry Boyce

Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, was interviewed on CBC Radio’s The Current on May 13 (To listen, go here, scroll down to Part 3 and click the play button on the audio icon. To download a podcast, go here and scroll down to Drunkard’s Walk.) The New York Times published a helpful review when the book came out last June.

Mlodinow’s specialty is probability and statistics and he presents one of the strongest versions of the view that the world is vastly unpredictable, which renders many of our efforts at planning and strategy foolish. Interestingly, as so often is the case, he doesn’t really go far enough.

Leaving aside the complex debate about whether there is any such thing as true randomness rather than simply a mass of interconnected causes and conditions too vast to be encompassed (and perhaps that’s a distinction without a difference in the end), what Mlodinow doesn’t account for is something like shih.

He doesn’t delve into how deep our ability to perceive patterns at a subtle level may be. He doesn’t give much quarter to the power of contemplative mind, to intuition. We are presented essentially as victims. Yet others, such as Norman Schwarzkopf, when faced with vast complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability (randomness if you like) have concluded that character, your way of being, the basic momentum and direction you have developed to date is what you can rely on. Through the deep knowing and cultivation of our basic being that is encouraged by the Sun Tzu, we can turn the tables on randomness and interconnectedness. It’s the basic ground rather than the enemy.

Barry Boyce

This morning on the Canada Broadcasting Corporation there was a segment of the show called The Current featuring an interrogator who claims that friendly techniques that work with the basic patterns of the person are much more effective than torture and other kinds of coercive techniques.

He goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander. His team was responsible for the information that led the US to finding Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He’s just come out with  How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.   

Time offers a very good synopsis of the book. There’s also a piece on Axcess News that includes comments from Alexander about the ineffectiveness of torture.

It’s uncanny how his description in the interview of his techniques accord with the overall approach of the Sun Tzu. Rather than trying to break the interviewee down (going against), he tries to discern the interviewee’s basic nature and let that take him where it will lead. Essentially, he works more with the shih than with the person. In particular, some lines from the Sun Tzu that come to mind in this regard:

 Now the form of the military is like water.

Water in its movement avoids the high and hastens to the low.

The military in its victory avoids the solid and strikes the empty.

Thus water determines its movement in accordance with the earth.

The military determines victory in accordance with the enemy.

The military is without fixed shih and without lasting form.

 To be able to transform with the enemy is what is meant by “spiritlike.”

From Chapter 6

To listen to the interview, go to The Current. At the bottom of the description of Part 2, there is an icon you can press to listen. The podcaset will probably be available soon.

Barry Boyce

From an article in Backbone, a tech mag produced by Toronto’s Globe & Mail. 

Loren Hicks, a Toronto-based independent management consultant, says that the fact that Microsoft’s browser updates will now come faster to market still doesn’t compete with a community-based product like Firefox.

“The key constraint on software development is not money, but brainpower. No matter how well funded, a command-and-control organization will never be able to compete on product quality against a widely dispersed open community. You can’t buy innovation or unbiased peer-review.”

The Sun Tzu principle of shih, which provides the backbone of our book, The Rules of Victory, depicts the world more like a game of Go—complex, multi-dimensional, ever-shifting, and interdependent—than a game of checkers, which is more of a straight-out slugging match. As such, it lends itself much more readily to working “widely dispersed open communities” rather than command-and-control situations.

James Gimian & Barry Boyce  

In the June 18, 2008, Toronto Globe and Mail, business book reviewer Harvey Schachter reviewed Stall Points by Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever, Yale University Press. The book talks about how successful companies hit a takeoff point, and soar. But eventually, most meet a stall point, where suddenly everything seems to fall apart. The review mentions that the authors make the point that “it is the assumptions that you believe the most deeply or that you have held true for the longest time that are likely to prove your undoing.” Here’s what I wrote to Harvey about that:

I am continually shocked in my consulting work with how blind even the most successful and effective leaders are to the limitations of their own views. Jerome Groopman talks about it in How Doctors Think. The neuroscientists talk about it in discussing the problems with cognitive bias.

In Rules of Victory we talk about it in terms of View, and how that leads (or doesn’t) to synchronized and effective Practices and Actions.

One of my favorite images in talking about this is the experience of using a flashlight on a dark night: It simultaneously sharpens perception at the focus but renders the periphery more opaque. Since so many answers lie somewhere in the periphery, our ability to see and understand what’s lies out there needs to be expanded. This is akin to what Olson and Bever present in seeing the limitations of the assumptions underlying one’s strategy.

James Gimian

Welcome to Victory Chatter, the blog for the Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict—Strategies from the Art of War, which is an extended commentary that builds on the Denma translation of The Art of War.

This blog gives us an opportunity to continue the conversations and observations that formed our book. As we see Sun Tzu principles reflected in all manner of ways in many different arenas, we’ll point to them and chat about them—with each other and with you. Just as happened with the book, we find that examples abound in our interconnected world and we stumble on them every other day. Our first entry is one such example.

The students in Barry’s communications class in the Bachelor of Informatics program at Dalhousie University are making presentations about books they read this term. Tian Yu Zhao, who recently moved here from China, was giving a presentation about The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. He began with the following quotation:

              One leads to two

              Two leads to three

              Three leads to many more.

and explained that it was a Taoist statement well-known to the average Chinese person.

It struck us immediately as having the same combination of almost brutal simplicity and profundity that we have found in the Sun Tzu, The Art of War.  It also quickly reminded Barry of something he had read in The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon and posted on his bulletin board as if it were a poem:

 Small changes

add up

over time

The cadence and meaning of those short phrases recalled for us some key images that recur in the Art of War: rocks rolling downhill and water flowing from high to low. Rather than trying to command the world and control the world, we can make use of these simple, self-existing forces. We’ll encounter them in classrooms, in book rooms, on the street, and in the field.

That’s what we’re going to do in this blog, in our individual voices, jointly, back and forth, with you and among you. We’re going to chat about chaos, conflict, taking whole, interconnectedness, forming, transforming, the extraordinary, the orthodox, and the strange—the many themes that pervade the Sun Tzu and emerge from a profound yet simple understanding of the workings of everyday life big and small. That means life in our homes, offices, communities, organizations, nations, and the world as a whole.

When we bump up against something that resonates with the common worldly wisdom expressed so beautifully in the Art of War, we’re going to point it out and talk it up and talk about it with anyone who wants to join in. It’ll be nice to have this little chat with everyone.

James Gimian and Barry Boyce