The Tao of the Tipping Point
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