19. Sun Tzu and The Art of Winning - Business Bits - 30 Days Challenge

"He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight." - Sun Tzu

I’m fascinated by Sun Tzu. Like all the titans of ancient literature, nobody really knows for sure if he actually wrote the famous “Art of War”, or if it’s just a collection of rules and strategies collated together under that name. Nobody knows exactly when he was born and when he died, and information about his life is often mixed with folklore.

And yet, with a surprising consistency, "The Art of War" is spot on, and I’m certainly not talking only about weaponry and fighting on the field. It’s still very actual in many areas of modern life, business and entrepreneurship being among the most prominent, in my opinion.

The Art of Winning

I think a more appropriate name for this book should be “The Art of Winning”. Because Sun Tzu doesn’t teach how to fight. He teaches how to win.

Let’s look again at that quote and let’s try to put it in simpler words.

My favorite way of translating it is: if you don’t have to fight in order to win, then just don’t.

Look again at those words. This is a very subtle reframing of the word “winning”: it suddenly doesn’t have to be linked to “fighting” anymore. There’s no direct link between fighting and winning.

That’s huge.

Because, first of all, it forces you to switch focus from learning a coarse set of skills - basically, using violence towards somebody else (the basic definition of fighting ), to a more subtle set of skills, which is obtaining victory, not necessarily by using violence.

This often happens in business, when we lean too much towards how to “block competition”, instead of focusing on the long term goal (which is providing value to our customers in a consistent way). We spend more time trying to limit other competitors on the market, which, subsequently, translates in less time spent on improving our products, or getting feedback from our clients.

Now let's get real about this.

How To Lose The Battle Of Smartphones, By Fighting Too Much

First, there was the iPhone. I suppose everyone agrees that this product disrupted an entire market. Suddenly, people were willing to pay a lot more money for a thing that didn’t actually exist before.

It was, from a business perspective, like finding the promised land, like discovering a new country. The paradisiac ecosystem created by iPhone is real and in this “land” there is continuous growth, which, from a country perspective, translates into continuous abundance and thriving. Nice, right?

But then, you know, there are other people looking for abundance and thriving. And some of them are choosing to just looking to take this land from somebody else, instead of building their own. Bummer.

That’s basically the definition of war between Apple and, let’s say, Samsung. Apple is a rich country and Samsung is fighting for its money and resources. Or market share, same thing. In Sun Tzu words, they are “at war”, they’er battling.

Alas, this is not a battle to be won by fighting. Like Sun Tzu said in this case: the winner doesn’t really have to engage in ‘fighting”, because the loser already did.

By incessantly trying to copy Apple’s products, designs and features, Samsung eventually exhausted their creative powers (whatever amount they had to begin with). They went so far that their latest product is actually catching fire. Samsung Galaxy 7 is a time bomb.

So, as we all see, there’s not much that iPhone, as a product, does lately. Not too much fighting there. There aren’t any huge improvements, there’s no disruptive technology launched. You can clearly see that there isn’t a lot of money pouring into R&D or marketing. Sometimes I think the biggest marketing expense for Apple is basically the cost of renting Jony Ive’s voice to read a text with 74 synonyms of “shiny”. I’m joking, of course, but my point is that Apple doesn’t really fight here.

He just won the battle without fighting.

Sometimes - I would say, most of the times - all you have to do is to just focus on the client and you won't even have to fight a battle at all.

You already won.

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This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.