The Essential Framework for Understanding The Art of War
Episode Stats
Summary
Jim Gimian argues that The Art of War is a holistic text about how to approach conflict and obstacles in a holistic, interconnected way. Underlying this approach are three dynamics, heaven, earth, and general, which correspond to view, practice, and action.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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You heard about the art of war, and it sounded pretty cool. So you picked up a copy to read.
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But you found that, beyond a few of its famous maxims, a lot of this text attributed to the
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ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu was hard to understand, much less incorporated into
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your life. My guest offers a tripartite framework that can help you get a lot more out of the art
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of war. His name is Jim Gimian, and he's an editor of one of the text translations, as well as the
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co-author of The Rules of Victory, How to Transform Chaos and Conflict, Strategies from the Art of War.
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Today on the show, Jim argues that the art of war is a holistic, interconnected text that's about how
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to approach conflict and obstacles in a holistic, interconnected way. Underlying this approach are
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three dynamics, heaven, earth, and general, which correspond to view, practice, and action.
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Jim and I talk about the importance of constantly orienting and reorienting yourself to an ever-changing
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world, working with the sure or energy in the landscape you're navigating, using action to
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further refine your perspective, and more. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash art of war. All right, Jim Gimian, welcome to the show.
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Hey, thanks, Brett. Thanks for inviting me. Good to talk to you.
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So you co-authored a book called The Rules of Victory, How to Transform Chaos and Conflict.
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And this is basically, you and your co-author have taken the things you talk about in your
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consulting work, leadership consulting, about lessons from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. I'm curious,
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how did you end up teaching leadership programs based on this Chinese text of war strategy?
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Yeah, it's a good question. It's a long story, and I'll give away a little bit of my age here.
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You know, it really started, you know, like a lot of things we discover that are helpful
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and valuable in our lives. It started with an experience of being disappointed
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and being disillusioned and having a feeling that, you know, things should be better than this.
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And that happened to me in a number of different areas simultaneously. And it goes back to the years
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I was in college. I was at Stanford in the late 60s. And, you know, it was a great small college at
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that point with a great reputation. And I went full of pep and looking to become one of the great
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leaders as everybody does at 17. It was possible in those days to get to know your professors very
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well, which I did. They were arguably the leaders in their field. And part of getting to know them is
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you get invited to their houses and meet their families and observe close in. And what became evident
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really quickly is there was no transfer between the wisdom that they attained as their big heroes in
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their field of expertise and the way they treated their family at home. And I just thought,
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I don't think I want to wind up where this road leads. And, you know, this was also the time a
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tremendous amount of disruption and disillusionment and disintegration of structures in our society in
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the late 60s, anti-war, civil rights, counterculture, psychedelic era. And, you know, I was able to
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witness firsthand the anti-war movement very close up, and it soon became clear that neither side
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really had any kind of insight into how to overcome aggression. And, you know, as a young guy who kind
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of reverted to force and aggression to solve my problems, I just, again, saw there was no real
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insight. So the final, I think, part of it was, you know, this was the psychedelic era, and there were
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opportunities to take classes in, you know, using hallucinogens to understand more about your mind.
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And I took a couple of those classes, speaking metaphorically here, of course. And it was
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tremendously eye-opening. You know, it showed that reality was not something that was fixed. And
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more than that, my version of reality wasn't always the only one. So those kind of propelled me out of
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the college scene and really took me into the art of war, among other things, in the early 70s. And
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that started me on a long course. I found a group of friends and colleagues, other men who were studying
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it. So we kind of had a men's group over a number of years. And little by little, you know, we saw that
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there was a lot of profundity that was not coming through in these older translations.
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So at the time, I had a good friend who was doing his PhD in Asian studies at UC Berkeley. So I said to
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him, you know, one day I said, so look, man, there's a lot of stuff in here that these other translations
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aren't bringing out. Let's do a translation with the men's group and you. And he looked at me without
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any hesitation and he said, you're crazy. We can't do that. So I left that conversation kind
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of with my tail between my legs. I went back to the men's group. And a couple of years later,
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I was at a conference. I was standing in the lunch line. And this friend, this guy who's just
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finished his degree in Asian studies and got a job at Bowdoin College, butts into the line. He looks at me
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and he says, okay, Jim, I'm ready. So I say, well, ready for what? And he says, you know,
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translate the art of war. And without skipping a beat, I looked at him and said, we can't do that.
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That's crazy. Well, we did. We started and we started very simply. We took the parts of the text
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that really were most meaningful for us, often the sort of maxims or slogans that everybody knows.
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And we translated those. And little by little, they showed that there was a lot of profundity in
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those parts that were more opaque and that we didn't really make a connection to. Well,
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before too long, we had the whole thing translated. We submitted it to publishers,
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signed a contract, and now, you know, sold over a million copies in 11 languages. And that is called
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the art of war, the Denman translation. That was the first book, which has essays and a commentary
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that we wrote on the lines. So when that came out, I got asked to teach to people who were saying,
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this is great stuff, but how do I actually do it in my life and in my leadership capacity?
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So I responded to those requests over five or seven years. And the rules of victory
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is an attempt to summarize what I learned in responding to those people who asked the question,
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how can I do this in my life? So, you know, it's been a long journey. It's never been like a
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franchise or a full-time gig, but it's been constant. It's been continuous and kind of spread by
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natural connections. People like you who, you know, somehow connected to the book, saw some insights
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there that they thought would be helpful for them and had a genuine connection to it. And
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that led me to, you know, more work. Now that I'm kind of scaling down my work in the nonprofit sector,
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I'm able to engage more with the teaching and the coaching around the art of war. And it
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So the art of war, I think it's a book that really, I think young men, I remember in high school,
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I picked up a copy from Barnes and Noble thinking that would provide some sort of insight on how to
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be effective and conquer the world. And as you said, I think as a young man, I was really drawn
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to those maxims or slogans. What I hope this conversation does is it susses out and really
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fleshes out that bigger view, the profundity that you were talking about. Before we do,
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let's talk about the art of war itself, the history of it. It was authored, the author you often see
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there is this guy named Sun Tzu. Who was Sun Tzu? Was it a real person? More than one person? It's kind
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of like asking who was Homer, who wrote the Odyssey. Yeah. Yeah. Well, by way of background,
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the art of war comes to us from what's called the Warring States period of China, roughly speaking,
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500 to 200 BC. At the start of this period, what we know as China on the mainland was maybe 75 or more
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small kingdoms and fiefdoms, spending a lot of time either repelling invasions from the north mostly or
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trying to take over each other. So there was a lot of ongoing battles between them. And over some time,
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it sort of settled into about 15 larger kingdoms. And at the start of this time, there were no standing
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armies. If a king wanted to declare war, he challenged the opposing king to a kind of almost
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a dance in decked out chariots, and someone would be declared the winner. And that's how they'd take
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over the adjoining kingdom. But little by little, this need to develop standing armies, when the king
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wanted to go to war, the king would conscript farm workers. And these were largely untrained,
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ignorant young men, and the king would hire a mercenary general. And the role of this mercenary general
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was by mercenary, meaning he might work for one kingdom, one campaign, and another kingdom, the next.
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But what this mercenary king had to do was to take this band of ignorant farm boys and train them as
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an army. And largely, what we come to know as the art of war now is the means by which the mercenary
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general did that. The Sun Tzu, we refer to the text as the Sun Tzu, because it is a body of work that
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probably emerged over several generations during this period. Scholars themselves are mixed on the
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issue of was there a real historical character? Some say yes, some say maybe, some say no. I don't know.
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I don't know the answer to that. But I can tell you from our point of view, this represents a kind of a
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lineage, a conversation that went on over that period. And from our point of view, has continued to this
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day. Because if you read the literature, you will see not just the text itself, these 13 scant chapters
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that are left, but oodles of commentaries by military leaders across the centuries, who are joining in the
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conversation. So when we do a workshop, most often in a corporate setting, we actually describe this as
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continuing that conversation. We're grappling with these same issues of how does one deal more
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effectively with conflict that's all around us in human existence? How can we do that better? What
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means, what views, what methods lead to a more successful engagement with conflict?
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So it was written, kind of came about during the warring states period. And because of that, that
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shapes the strategies or the insights that you find in the art of war. So it's a period where there's
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lots of different kingdoms and they're constantly jockeying for position. One guy could be in charge for a
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little bit than another guy. So it's very uncertain. Conflict was always happening. And that shapes what
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And what does that remind you of? Is that a description of anything else in modern day?
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Yeah, today. Yeah. I mean, like, yeah, someone who owns it, who's a business owner, you're competing,
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it's constantly shifting. Guys who were on top, you know, five years ago can be out of business today.
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Exactly. Exactly. And that's one of the reasons why the lessons and the methodologies that were honed
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over hundreds of years in that setting in China are so applicable and valuable because it emerged in
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a time very similar to ours. And so the view, the elements that created successful and skillful
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techniques lead to the same now, the ability to respond to uncertainty, to be able to shift quickly,
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to respond to the changes. And I think one element that we emphasize is that during that time in
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China, the worldview was that the world was not separate entities, but it was one interconnected,
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interdependent, constantly changing whole thing. And that's another way in which our view has shifted
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over the last 40 or 50 years. We used to see the world as individual things that we could act upon.
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Well, as things got more complex, as the whole uncertainty and the emergence of complexity as
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a kind of foremost way of looking at the world took over our view, it didn't work anymore. People had
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to throw out their strategic plans because they became useless within, you know, hours of being
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completed because everything had changed already. So the kinds of trainings of how to respond that come out
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of that time of seeing the world interconnected. Now it's a little easier for us to see the
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interconnection, social media, the internet, the weather patterns that are changing constantly, the way in
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which, you know, look at the supply chain issues in terms of interconnectivity. So we're able more genuinely to
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adopt a view that leads to skillful actions. It starts with that interconnected view.
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And we'll talk more about that because that's a big important point from The Art of War that you flesh
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out. But before we do, before we kind of flesh out this profundity you want people to take away when they
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read your book, when you talk to people about The Art of War, because I think a lot of people have maybe
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read quips of it, what do you think a lot of people get wrong or miss when they read The Art of War?
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Well, you know, first of all, I think we have to admit it's a tough read. It can often be opaque and
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dense and difficult to understand it. It doesn't give up its treasures easily. So and then, you know,
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a lot of people just dismiss it out of hand because it's all about war and warlike and people want to
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think they can deal with conflict in a whole different way. But I think in my view over the years,
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you know, the main thing is that, as I just said, you know, the skillful actions actually arise from
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seeing the world as an interconnected whole. And the part that most people miss is that
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we as leaders are an integrated part of that interconnected whole. So the mistake people make
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is they think they can extract a few of the lessons and then use that to sort of get over on others.
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They're apart from that interconnected whole. They can act upon others. They can, you know, conquer
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and one-up others using these little tricks. And, you know, the magic of those skills, which appear as
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tricks to people, comes from that view of interconnectedness. And if you don't have that,
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then there's a power in things like employing sure, this great sort of central view of
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working with the energy that's in systems in the world. It's just not, it's just not possible.
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It's like any kind of discipline where you see somebody dip in, you know, quickly learn some of
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the language and then start teaching it. You kind of have a feeling that they've never genuinely
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learned the deeper discipline. They've never really integrated the deeper lessons and therefore the
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sort of maxims and the tricks don't have the profundity. You can kind of feel it.
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So I think you argued to really understand the art of war, you have to understand this framework.
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It's a tripart framework of heaven, earth, general. So let's talk about heaven first.
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Well, I think, you know, the first thing to take note of is the heaven, earth, and general
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framework appears in a lot of places in Chinese philosophy and literature. And it appears in the
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very first chapter of the art of war as the middle of what the first chapter calls the five.
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The first chapter is about kind of an overview and how to take assessments, how to actually look at a
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situation and see, well, do you stand a chance of dealing with conflict in a victorious way?
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What are the obstacles? What can you learn? So the five starts with the Tao, which is that sense of
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how things really are, how things really are, the rules, the law, when you apply that to a situation,
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what the Tao means is, is there coherence between the leader and the army or the leader and the team,
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if it's a corporate setting? Is there a common culture, context, language, and view that gives
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cohesion and strength? Then it goes into number two is heaven. Number three is earth. Number four is the
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general. And then number five of the five is what's called methods. And that's the way a general
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actually organizes and orders and develops an army. So in the middle, you have these three.
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Heaven. Now, first, let's talk about how a general regards these three. For a general, heaven is the
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weather. Because if you're going to move an army, you have to know what conditions will you be facing
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that are weather related. Earth in a military setting is terrain. So what's the ground of the
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situation? What ground am I moving the army through? What will that require? And the general,
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the general is literally the person who's got to make the decisions joining the realities of the
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weather and the terrain. So really, if you take a step back and apply this principle to any leadership
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setting, leaders basically faced with the same situation. Heaven can be, you know, aspirations,
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the vision, what you have to accomplish, the future that you're trying to bring about.
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Earth is the conditions of the situation, the realities of whatever the setting is.
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You know, if you're talking about taking a team through a successful campaign to launch a new
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product, what's the ground of that? What's the competition? What's your capability to produce and
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market? What's your capability to actually, you know, successfully launch? And then as the leader,
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you've got to assess how you have a goal, how you inevitably have obstacles or resistance,
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this notion of, you know, the earth, and then how do you move forward? So, you know, I think it's
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easiest to understand something like heaven or earth or general in the context of how it works as a system
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all together. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. And another way of looking at this framework is that heaven is view,
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earth is practice, and general is action. And it's interesting, this view part, right? So heaven,
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view, how we see the world. It reminded me of another military strategist, John Boyd, who developed
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the OODA loop. And the view part is the Orient, right? And he said that Orient is part of this
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OODA loop thing of observe, Orient, decide, act. Orient is how you see the world. It's all these
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mental models and your culture could contribute to it and the goals that you had going into a
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decision. And the Orient phase, that drove how you would act or make decisions. And then it was a
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cycle. It would just cycle through. You'd make an action, you would see what happened with your action,
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and then you'd put that back into the Orient phase and then decide again and act and over and over
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again. And Sun Tzu was basically saying the same thing thousands of years ago.
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That's right. And of course, you know, if you're a student of John Boyd in the OODA loop, you know
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that he was a great student of the art of war and integrated a lot of that into his development of
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fighter pilot training. I mean, he's regarded as the founder of many of the basics of jet fighting,
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strategy, and action. And what you described is exactly what he taught.
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And he also talked about this idea, you have to see things holistically. Because like the stuff
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that he talked about was used later on in counterinsurgencies, right? And he said, in order
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to be an effective counterinsurgent, you have to, you can't just think about the battles. You also have
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to think about, well, if we win this battle, that might have some negative consequences. And so we have
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to do it in a certain way and we have to maybe win the hearts and minds of the people. That's another
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way you could go about it. And so I think this is a great segue to talk about Sun Tzu's idea
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of taking the whole. So we've been talking about that. When you're viewing the world,
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you want to see the world in a connected whole. But let's flesh out, where else do you see this
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Well, you know, I think the best, simplest way to understand that principle is if you look back at
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that mercenary general's challenge, his king had conscripted soldiers from off the farms.
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And so, in fact, the soldiers were farmers. And at a certain point in a world that was interconnected,
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if you conquer the neighboring land by killing all the soldiers, there'll be no one left to produce food
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when you take over that territory. So there is a lesson about the interconnectedness.
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We have to see all the implications of how we respond to conflict because that employee in the
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company you take over is somebody you're going to rely on to produce the products of value of the
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company that you just took over. We have so many examples from people in the workshops that we do
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where they have actually shown, we have a slide that shows farmer equals soldier with the circle
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in the line through it saying, kill a soldier, kill a farmer, who've used that single slide to go to
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two of their reports, say one in production and one in accounting, who are squabbling and fighting
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about when the report's going to happen and what's the format, and the leader showing them that
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they need each other to be successful. So dealing with conflict has to include all the repercussions
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in order to have a meaningful, successful outcome. And that's the taking hold, which, you know, goes
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right back to the most iconic lines in the art of war about, you know, the 100 victories and 100 battles
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isn't the most skillful. Subduing the other's military without battle is the most skillful. And
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that's, you know, the kind of seed syllable of the whole notion of taking hold.
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So what is, you know, what does he, people love quoting that line, but I think it gets
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misunderstood because I think it means like when people read that as well, you got to figure out
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a way with duplicity and some intrigue to beat the guy without actually fighting. But it sounds like
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there's something more going on there, the way you describe it in the book.
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Yeah, I think the most common way for us to understand it nowadays is as things have gotten to be
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more complex. We have to look at solutions as being more systemic actions. So for example,
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you have a team of 10 to 15, and there's maybe a very problematic, challenging, difficult employee in
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that team. And the conventional way is to go at that challenge directly. Whereas in terms of
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dealing with a complex system, every one of the people has relationships with each other.
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So dealing with the shaping that team, putting certain sort of bumpers and goals, mutual goals in
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line, requires each one of those people to conform and work as part of the system. And that creates,
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you know, as we've seen so many times, a situation where that difficult or problematic
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person sees that that's not the place for them. The team is going in a certain direction,
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the company is going in a certain direction, and they would be better off somewhere else,
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they decide to seek another place could be another place within the company, another department,
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it could be another company altogether. But it's an example that comes right out of the
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employing sure that is how to form and shape the ground of a situation to address a conflict or a
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difficulty. It doesn't really require subterfuge. But it's kind of an indirect warfare, something that
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the art of war is very well known for indirect warfare. But it's just another way of saying
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dealing with the situation systemically. So I think that the issue of subterfuge is
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really a misconception, it does derive from the way the art of war talks about deception. But, you know,
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deception is a whole range of behaviors. And the extreme range that people often default to,
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the kind that may be required in dealing with an enemy that means you lethal harm, is really not the
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situation most of us find ourselves in in life. So there are a lot of more plastic ways of dealing
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with systemic change that don't require those being, you know, tricky or deceptive in a way that's
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causing the question one's moralistic behavior. I think that's an exaggeration and unnecessary.
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Yeah, I think you're right. I think it can mean something not as conniving as people would think.
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I think people use it all the time without even knowing. So I think, I think the big takeaway
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from the view is, so the view is just how you see the world. And I think important thing to
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understand is for Sun Tzu, you had to take the whole, you had to see the big picture and understand
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that you are part of that picture. So the decisions you make, you act on the world, but the world is
00:27:25.180
going to act back on you. And the world is going to change because of your decisions. And as a
00:27:30.220
consequence of that, you have to update your view. So there's no, you really can't have a,
00:27:34.540
a static worldview. You can have guiding principles that can shape that big view,
00:27:40.380
but you have to have some flexibility on, you know, just updating your mental models when you
00:27:48.380
I think we, basically what we did is we, we went to earth next, right? We kind of connected
00:27:52.860
heaven to earth, right? So heaven is view and earth is the terrain, the situation,
00:27:59.820
kind of the specifics, right? What we find ourselves. And that will dictate what we do
00:28:07.500
Yeah. Bring about heaven, basically. Yeah. And an important part of this earth component,
00:28:13.500
you dig in deep in the book, is this idea of sure. Now it's pronounced, it's spelled S-H-I-H,
00:28:18.780
I believe. It is, it is. That's the Chinese, the transliteration in English, but it is pronounced
00:28:25.100
sure. Sure. So this is a really important concept because you really, you hammer this
00:28:29.660
home in the book. So what is sure and why is it important to understand what sure is?
00:28:37.500
Well, it's a, it's a natural outcome of seeing the world as an interconnected whole,
00:28:42.140
that parts move other parts. You know, it's a wonderfully rich and helpful idea. And it's so rich,
00:28:48.620
it's why we didn't translate it in, in our, in our book. You know, it's probably, if you looked at the
00:28:55.900
various translations of the art of war, there are 20 different words used when sure appears words like
00:29:03.100
energy or configuration or advantage or momentum, things that are familiar to us. But we just felt
00:29:11.340
that to convey to the reader, the richness of this concept, we would keep and retain its,
00:29:16.380
it's Chinese and carry all those meanings forward. But fundamentally, sure is talking about how any
00:29:24.180
system has energy within it and a pattern of how that energy moves and that energy can form a
00:29:32.060
particular configuration of forces that affects effective power. So that's one way in which sure
00:29:39.840
describes a phenomenal world. And the text has wonderful images from the natural world that it
00:29:46.180
uses things like how a meandering stream in the high mountain plains then turns into a tumultuous
00:29:55.460
rushing river with such force that it can toss rocks about. That's one of the lines right out of the
00:30:01.700
text. It tosses rocks about. And then that same water becomes a mass behind a dam, which is another way
00:30:10.020
that power is accumulated in a certain configuration and can be released and focused and used for the leader.
00:30:19.300
So, so the examples of this for us, in addition to the physical world are, you know, things like,
00:30:29.300
you know, football is a perfect example of trying to discern the weak spot on the opposition and amass
00:30:38.580
the powers in the offense's configuration to strike that open and weak spot. You know, we have broad concepts,
00:30:49.140
like leverage or the tipping point popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, how alignment of forces within
00:30:58.340
a situation make quick action possible that wasn't before. One of our kind of thought partners in this
00:31:07.060
is a politician on the national scale. And before finding the art of war, he used to talk about,
00:31:15.060
is the situation ripe to take a particular action? Are the forces aligned? And now he talks to his staff
00:31:23.860
in the language of the art of war. They talk about the sure and looking at the configuration, depending
00:31:30.980
on, you know, for example, at one point, not that long ago, maybe a little over a year, it was about
00:31:35.460
when to start bringing the attack message about China into the national dialogue.
00:31:46.820
Now, you know, there's been a longstanding symbiotic relationship and close relationship,
00:31:53.860
whether we've admitted it or not, in terms of our iPhones made in China, just the simplest example.
00:32:00.820
But at a certain point, it became political advantage, measured in how many dollars it
00:32:06.580
would raise in fundraising to start bashing the Chinese. But the calculation for the politicians
00:32:11.860
was, if they came out too soon, and it wasn't the right timing, they wouldn't get the donations
00:32:20.100
back from that line. So they had to kind of calculate when was the right moment.
00:32:26.020
Now, that's one possible way of sort of seeing about reading the situation, the alignment of
00:32:33.940
the power in that situation. And as the text talks about in terms of employing sure,
00:32:40.340
the good leader waits for the moment where the action is like rolling around rock down a steep hill.
00:32:49.780
Doesn't take much effort because that's what that rock wants to do, pull down by gravity.
00:32:54.660
So sure, it's hard to translate, but it's the juice, you know, it's the mojo. When I was
00:33:00.580
reading the book and I saw sure, I was thinking momentum, you know, it's the momentum that shows
00:33:05.380
up in the terrain, in the earth, you know, in the circumstances you find yourself in. And you
00:33:10.740
really can't control it. But a good leader, you know, he can he can nudge it, he can recognize it and
00:33:18.500
be ready to take advantage of it when it does appear. So we've talked about heaven and earth,
00:33:23.540
or view and practice. Let's talk about action. And you say that before you take action or, you know,
00:33:30.980
skilled action, it's important to engage in what you called knowing, which is a direct ongoing
00:33:38.420
relationship in connection with the elements of your life. And we can know by using our senses and
00:33:45.140
picking up on patterns. But there are challenges and limitations to knowing. And I think everyone,
00:33:50.740
you know, everyone's heard about cognitive biases and how they can hinder our view. And if our view
00:33:55.940
is clouded, then we can't take right action. What the art of war says is that victory is created long
00:34:02.420
before the battle arises. So before we take skillful action, we have to try to get our thinking, you know,
00:34:09.060
our view as clear as possible. But then I think too, you know, action is also the way to figure out
00:34:15.780
if your view is correct or not, right? It's like, it's feedback.
00:34:20.260
That's right. It's a feedback loop. Just like Boyd talked about too.
00:34:24.300
Yeah. So you take action to see if it's right, and it might be right, it might be wrong. And then you
00:34:29.200
just take that feedback, and then you put it back into your view. You take a look at the terrain,
00:34:34.420
the practices that you're using, and then modify, and then you try action again. And that was a good
00:34:39.400
point you made through the way you learn about action, a really effective way to learn about action
00:34:43.300
is looking at the stories of other individuals, leaders who took action. So you can see what
00:34:50.260
worked and what didn't work for them. So that's one of the reasons I love reading biographies.
00:34:58.400
Yeah, no, I think that's really great. I think, you know, there's nothing,
00:35:02.160
nothing more powerful, and we've learned this, than the story and narrative to move people.
00:35:08.520
You know, oftentimes, we're asked for examples about parts of what we're right about in the
00:35:16.720
rules of victory. And, you know, when you give an example, if it's not a story, it winds up being
00:35:23.760
a sort of one-directional, didactic, almost solid lesson that somebody either has to repeat or
00:35:31.040
they'll fail. And if you tell a story, a person can see themselves in that. And they can see the
00:35:39.240
possible skillful action that may arise for them in a similar situation. You know, one of the great
00:35:46.180
lines people will pick up on in the art of war is that victories cannot be transmitted in advance.
00:35:53.800
So you can't tell somebody exactly what the best action in their story is going to be. But a story
00:36:01.880
shared is an example that can widen the possible options for another person. So it's about helping
00:36:10.220
somebody discover insight, rather than giving them a prescribed set of rules that they have to follow.
00:36:16.200
So what's one thing you think listeners can start doing today to better understand the art of war
00:36:21.320
and start implementing this view, practice, action mindset in their lives?
00:36:27.160
You know, it's interesting you put it that way. When we do the workshops, usually they're two-day
00:36:32.500
workshops we do in corporate settings. One of the first things we say is, you know, you're going to
00:36:37.580
hear a lot of new terminology and ideas. Don't try to swallow it all. Just look for one thing,
00:36:45.880
just one thing that speaks to you, that makes you go, hmm, that makes sense to me and I can see how it
00:36:55.300
could have a positive benefit in my life. And that one thing, in fact, in terms of the way the art of
00:37:02.800
war is structured, gives you access to the whole thing. I mean, we describe the text as holistic and
00:37:11.340
fractal, that it's so integrated, it's so repetitive, that any part of it that speaks to you
00:37:19.900
gives you a real genuine entryway to all of the rest of it. So, you know, that's what we
00:37:28.600
encourage people to do. It can be one of the maxims that you described. You know, we describe
00:37:34.360
them as slogans because they're simple sentences that can trigger deep meaning and connection.
00:37:42.420
You know, it could be something like soldier farmer that triggers the ability to take whole
00:37:48.980
when you're confronted with a challenging situation rather than reverting to force,
00:37:55.280
you know, to see how your solution can be inclusive of others' aspiration.
00:38:00.320
So, I think the other thing, you know, following along our discussion of how challenges and failed
00:38:14.100
actions lead to more learning, I think one way of starting off with making the art of war
00:38:23.120
more a genuine part of your life is, you know, whenever that moment arises for you, it could
00:38:29.780
be an obstacle, a conflict, a seeming intractable situation. Be curious about your view. How are
00:38:37.840
you seeing the situation? What limitations is your view putting on the situation? Just kind of almost
00:38:44.520
a contemplative curiosity. And as long as that's done in a way that you have some kind of openness to
00:38:51.960
the interconnectedness of the world around you, some kind of basic, you know, ongoing curiosity,
00:38:57.660
and I think, you know, a sense of making friends with yourself, learning how you, you know, your
00:39:03.840
emotions and your mind work, whatever means that is for you, then it's possible to, you know, to make
00:39:09.600
a genuine connection, to start being part of the dialogue, as I talked about earlier, to start
00:39:16.100
entering into this sort of lineage of people who are looking to find a different way of dealing with
00:39:23.180
conflict, a different way of dealing with obstacles as a leader. Well, Jim, this has been a great
00:39:28.860
conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Well, there are two
00:39:34.340
books. In fact, there's the Art of War, the Denma Translation, and that, as I said, has a couple of
00:39:41.540
background essays and some commentary. We do our own line-by-line commentary, you know, as I said
00:39:47.640
earlier, a lot of the literature has commentary by generals throughout history, and rather than
00:39:56.660
reproduce those, as most other translations, we just thought we'd add our perspective to what
00:40:02.840
these lines in the text could mean for us in our lives in modern day. Then, of course, there's Rules
00:40:10.040
of Victory, the book, and the Rules of Victory website, which presents both the way we approach
00:40:17.920
the teaching of workshops and also the coaching that I do. And there's another resource out there
00:40:24.200
that's not ours, but I would recommend for someone. Professor Andrew Wilson at the Naval War College
00:40:31.580
has a relatively short, I think it's called Great Courses Available Through Audible, and he does a
00:40:38.780
wonderful job of presenting what the art of war is historically. He doesn't go where we go in terms
00:40:48.500
of how can you actually do this in your life, but that's not, you know, that's not his job, but it's
00:40:53.400
a wonderful articulation of the meaning and the history and very, very kind of user-friendly.
00:41:07.960
Yeah, it's episode 664, Masters of the Art of War.
00:41:11.880
Oh, that's great. So, you had this conversation before.
00:41:15.740
A bit of it. We talked about, you know, even Klaus Witz, we talked about the Peloponnesian
00:41:22.160
Yeah. Well, Jim Gimian, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:41:27.660
My guest today is Jim Gimian. He's the co-author of the book, The Rules of Victory. It's
00:41:30.840
available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about the book at the website,
00:41:34.100
rulesofvictory.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash artofwar, where we find
00:41:39.160
links to resources, and we delve deeper into this topic.
00:41:41.320
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Every week, Kate and I work hard
00:41:53.540
to distill interesting and actual insights from the authors and leaders in a variety
00:41:57.020
of fields and present them in an engaging, fluff-and-filler-free episode that comes in
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00:42:26.020
support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to not listen to the AOM Podcast, but