What Startups Can Learn From Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War | Hacker News Reader

What Startups Can Learn From Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War

techli.com

35 pointsMRonney26 comments

Good stuff. Personally, I've been spending a lot more time lately getting serious about strategic thinking, doing competitive analysis and formulating meaningful strategies instead of just "winging it" so much.

The book Outhink The Competition[1] really inspired me to start down this path. There's some good stuff in there, and that led to me finally picking up my copy of Porter's Competitive Strategy[2] and digging in. I take this seriously enough now, that I wrote a quick and dirty internal app just for managing competitive intelligence and keeping track of documents and links related to competitive analysis and strategy formulation.

Which, when you think about it, is a Good Thing. I mean, if you're talking to an investor and they say "how do you intend to compete with $FOO?" It's probably good to have a solid understanding of exactly how you intend to do that, instead of just saying "Oh, we'll out execute them." Especially when you choose to play in crowded markets like we do[3]...

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Outthink-Competition-Generation-Strate...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Indust...

[3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054540

Seems like if you could automate your app a little you might have a decent app targeted for the startup crowd :)

Funny you would mention that. This app has been so useful to me already, that I've considered making a SaaS offering out of it. If I don't do that, we might just release it as open-source. Or both. The biggest argument against making a SaaS offering out of it, is that this type of app isn't really core to what we're doing, and I'm worried that it would just turn into a distraction.

Open sourcing it would seem like a nice way to potentially have other people help make a product better for you that isn't your core product.

Or do what I think 37signals should have done with sortfolio. Start a subsidiary and put 1-2 people removed from your company in charge of it. That way you still own the IP, but you aren't required to focus on it.

Heh, I don't think we're big enough for a subsidiary yet. :-) But yeah, at some point I think we'll do something with it, even if it's just putting it up on Github. We're an Open Source startup anyway (as in, all of our core offerings are Open Source / AL 2.0 licensed), so doing that kind of thing is in our DNA.

Set it up as an internal SaaS tool. After you and others on your team have 'eaten your own dogwood' for a while, then start selling it. Even if it is a sideline product, it's still worth pursuing.

The Facebook, Twitter, Google.. buttons hover over the text. Not everyone is surfing the web on a 32' monitor in full screen you know!

Have to agree with Alex, trying to read around those floating buttons is incredibly annoying!

Social interstitials / floating elements are rapidly becoming one of my least favorite elements of current Web design.

"Remove It Permanently" plugin rocks Firefox. No such love on mobile browsers, unfortunately.

The Art of War is a work that I often hear recommended, but I seldom see endorsements for specific translations. Can anyone who is familiar with the work remark on which translations are considered best? Bonus points for versions available as free ebooks, although I'm not averse to visiting my local library either.

Original author of the article here. I used the 1910 Lionel Giles translation.

I own this one: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Sun-Tzu/dp/0385292163

I liked the interjected additional content it includes, but there are people who hate it, so YMMV.

I have read The Art of War at least 12 times in the past few years, from multiple translations, and my favorite one is from Ralph D. Sawyer: http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Art-Of-War/dp/0813330858/...

Translations can be extremely different, most of them are pretty vague, and many are just plain wrong. The above one is known between scholars to be one of the best translations out there, if not the best. He also gives a very nice 46-pages-long introduction to the context of where the book was written, and about who Sun Tzu was. Other than that, there at the end of each chapter there are some good comments from him, explaining certain aspects of it, which is good for the first reading.

I would stay away from the free ebooks/versions, I haven't yet found one with a good enough translation, and that causes issues like for example, the sixth chapter (one of the most important ones, in my opinion), which usually has a completely different interpretation in the free ones I've read, because of the bad translation.

I disagree with the author's interpretation of some of these points.

The author inteprets "... when able to attack, we must seem unable..." as meaning you should lay low. On the contrary, this is talking about the element of surprise and sending a signal that what's going on is the opposite of what's really going on. Are you about to launch? Say you're still hunkering down working on product. Do you have a ton of money available? Make it seem like you're operating on a shoestring. Are you operating on a shoestring? Then make it seem like you have plenty of funds. My understanding of various "Art of War" and military strategy type things I've seen is that the element of surprise is the single most important tool for leveraging a weak position into a strong one.

And the second quote, about "It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying on" is I think referring to people who have been through the horrors of war and hence know enough to be cautious and not rush into it, as opposed to younger/newer soldiers who can't wait to get into a battle and show how awesome they are. If this has any analogy to the startup world I'd think it would be more like "only those who've experienced the downsides of taking on VC funding will know whether they should take funding again next time vs. bootstrapping".

And on a related note, be sure to check out:

Hide a Dagger Behind a Smile: Use the 36 Ancient Chinese Strategies to Seize the Competitive Edge

http://www.amazon.com/Hide-Dagger-Behind-Smile-Competitive/d...

The Prince

http://www.amazon.com/Prince-Niccolo-Machiavelli/dp/03121497...

and

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Worldly-Wisdom-Balthasar-Gracian/d...

The Prince is an excellent book. However, it provides practical and ruthless advice on how to run a country. It's insights into human nature aren't very helpful in how to perform in the business world.

Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey - This article and it's responses tell me that there should be something available for anyone who just wants to learn from other people's experiences. To just throw something out there, imagine that something could be an app or website, possibly called "experienced" with nothing but a search bar when you arrive at it's homepage. Type in anything, click search and you get other people's experiences and stories on that subject organized by ratings. Quora is closely related to this idea, however Quora is about asking anything, it's not focused. The goal is to have a database of experiences, stories, quotes, etc. that people can quickly and effectively search through and learn what to do or not to do resulting in gaining confidence to accelerate to their goal in their current situation. Your thoughts?

I appreciated the examples the author cited. So often we see posts that layout generic advice by non-founding writers, its important to back your points up with case studies and examples.

I generally dislike articles like this--where they try to back up their "wise advice" by appealing to some tangentially-related ancient wisdom--but the examples made it worthwhile.

It's the 21st century and there's a field for this: Complexity Theory applied to organizations. There's no need for ancient dogma, we have science.

It's instructive to compare the two. 'Ancient dogma' is, after all, the result of hundreds, or in the Chinese case, thousands of years of social evolution.

This is a great book and I'd recommend it to anybody.

Despite the militaristic title, it's not about aggression or destroying your enemies. Throughout the book, open warfare is always depicted as the most costly and least desirable option. Adding an enemy's strength to yours, with zero destruction, is regarded as the ultimate form of victory.

You seem to be using destroy and open warfare synonymously. The Art of War is about one of these, not the other:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/destroy

  de·stroy  (d-stroi)
  v. de·stroyed, de·stroy·ing, de·stroys
  v.tr.
  1. To ruin completely; spoil: The ancient manuscripts were destroyed by fire.
  2. To tear down or break up; demolish. See Synonyms at ruin.
  3. To do away with; put an end to: "In crowded populations, poverty destroys the possibility of cleanliness" (George Bernard Shaw).
  4. To kill: destroy a rabid dog.
  5. To subdue or defeat completely; crush: The rebel forces were destroyed in battle.

See 5.

The pinnacle of military excellence is not to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles. It is to subjugate your enemy without fighting. -- Sun Tzu

What utter tripe. The author of this article "worked at startups in Boulder, CO and New York, where she worked to develop communities and delight users."

Translate that into English as "has spent her time writing navel-gazing articles like this that are unnecessarily idolised by a ton of adoring fans hanging on to every word."

The Art of War can really be applied to any domain or thing you want to do. It's beautiful in that it's specific and general at the same time. I once had a guy tell me to read it in high school when I was trying to win back a girl. It worked.

You can apply The Art of War to anything that involves competition. I don't know about anyone else but for me I think a lot of the success I've had in applying what's in the book to my life can't be totally attributed to just applying the advice in and of itself. For me, part of my success in its application most likely came from feeling more confident and like you knew some sort of secret ancient wisdom that someone else didn't know. Reading through it and thinking of applying it to your own situation really will have that confidence boosting effect I think.

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