Gary Gagliardi interview
Some have called Gary Gagliardi "the son of Sun Tzu" or "software samurai." Some have called him a master marketer of his Art of War Plus books on strategy topics such as business, love, parenting, and terrorism.
Perhaps we should look at the results to more accurately describe Mr. Gagliardi. A college dropout and unemployed as a young man until he discovered Sun Tzu. He then went on to help develop several businesses before selling FourGen, an accounting software company, to become a multimillionaire. He has since devoted his life expounding the concepts of the Art of War so others can achieve their goals as well.
Gary Gagliardi is not without controversy. We had a difficult time trying to reconcile our interview with him and his less-than-kind comments he made on his website about some of the authors we previously interviewed. Regardless, we believe everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Our purpose at Sonshi.com is not to act as a censor but a disseminator of varied and thus more complete knowledge of Sun Tzu.
You will find the following discussion with Mr. Gagliardi quite enlightening, especially if you are starting out in your career or want to learn more about our current situation with terrorism. His answer to balancing work and family is 100 percent correct. We are therefore grateful for him sharing his experiences so readers can benefit from his life lessons.
Sonshi.com: We ask this question to almost all of our honored guests: How did you first learn about Sun Tzu and what was it about his Art of War book you found interesting and/or useful? Did your family's military background fuel your interest?
Gagliardi: I was given a copy of the Art of War by my sister as a birthday present. I was an aimless college dropout at the time, having held four jobs in four years and been fired from a couple of them. I was in sales and saw almost immediately how Sun Tzu's ideas could be applied to the mistakes that I was making in selling. As I began applying these principles, my fortunes began to change.
My family's background in the military (both my father and mother were in the Army Air Corp and I was born on a military base in Alaska) probably disposed me to be interested in strategy, but my interest was really fueled by more immediate and practical considerations.
Sonshi.com: So you started out in sales and after a few rough years, success began with your rapid ascension at Bic Pen. All this in your twenties. How did Sun Tzu principles help you early in your career?
Gagliardi: Sun Tzu's principles guided me in two different ways. First, they helped me become more successful in sales. Secondly, they showed me how to transform that sales success into career advancement, first within Bic and then within Tandy Corporation. However, the two are very much connected.
Sun Tzu taught me a specific method of addressing challenges, what I call the listen-aim-move-claim cycle. For example, at Bic, I initially had a problem with my bosses, but following Sun Tzu's prescription, my first reaction was to LISTEN and learn about his situation.
Among the many things I learned was that he was personally frustrated with having to learn about computers, which were becoming more important in the ordering cycle in the late 19070s. Since I had some training in college in computers, I saw this as an opportunity to improve our relationships and made it my AIM to help him in this area. I MOVED into a position where I began helping him understand the various new computer reports. This allowed me to CLAIM a new position within BIC.
Actually, my knowledge of computers allowed me to become their Sales Manager of the Year in 1977 and later led directly to my career in computers and starting my own software company.
Sonshi.com: You had tremendous success in your next project, what later became FourGen Software -- featured twice by Inc. Magazine as America's fasting growing companies. Please share with our readers a story or two about your time at FourGen, and how Sun Tzu was applicable in the competitive marketplace.
Gagliardi: As our software company grew, I realized that if our success was to continue, I had to communicate my understanding of Sun Tzu's principles to our salespeople. By this time, I had learned that most people had a difficult time translating Sun Tzu's ideas from their military context to the context of everyday business competition. So, I did my first adaptation of Sun Tzu, The Art of Sales, for my company's own sales people.
The effects of this book were much broader than just putting the company onto the INC. 500 list of fastest-growing companies. Our sales guys started passing out copies of this book to our customers, which were companies such as AT&T, GE, and Motorola. They in turn started inviting me to speak on Sun Tzu at their conferences. Our position in the high-tech arena as proponents of Sun Tzu's strategic principles even became a publicity advantage: PC Week did a whole inside section about our use of Sun Tzu's philosophy in business.
Sun Tzu's influence was woven deeply into the nature of our company and its software. One of Sun Tzu's central principles is that rigid plans don't work. Instead, successful competitors must be able to quickly adjust to changes in their competitive situation.
However, as computer software became more integral to company operations, we saw that it tends to set company procedures in stone: making them impossible to change as the marketplace evolved. We built our software an entirely different way so that it was easy to change as needs evolved. We called this concept "modifiability by design." This concept was the basis of our success and based directly on Sun Tzu's principles.
Sonshi.com: After you sold FourGen, you started to seriously study Sun Tzu's Art of War straight from the source -- translating the work from the Chinese. We bet it was a very rewarding experience (which later led to numerous books in your Art of War Book Series by Clearbridge Publishing). What prompted you to research more into The Art of War?
Gagliardi: Well, despite selling our software company, I was still being invited all over the world to talk about Sun Tzu's principles and their application in business. However, I had always been very unhappy with all the contradictions and conflicts in the English translations of The Art of War.
I had about ten different English translations and they certainly didn't agree with one another. Even worse, almost all were internally inconsistent, where Sun Tzu seemed to say one thing in one place and contradict that statement in another. Languages have always been my hobby and, at the time, I had spent about three years studying written Japanese, so I had some grounding in the Kanji character set that is shared with Chinese.
However, I discovered that ancient Chinese is a language unto itself, written more conceptually (or poetically, as some prefer) than any modern spoken language. Fortunately, I also have a bit of a background in mathematics and physics and I immediately saw the similarities between The Art of War and classical Greek mathematics, especially Euclid (I also study ancient Greek).
With my background in using Sun Tzu's concepts successfully in business competition with years of explaining these ideas to others, I was better positioned to interpret Sun Tzu's equations than someone who was a linguist alone. I started with the assumption that Sun Tzu didn't contradict himself so, if there was a contradiction in the translation, the problem was with the translation, not the original.
I also had the advantage of working from a complete compilation of Sun Tzu various textual traditions created by the University of Taipei, so I had a more complete source document that many other English translators and a number of Chinese dictionaries on the Internet for doing research and on-line versions of other texts from the period (such as the Tao Te Ching).
One of the conclusions I came to was that no English translation could capture the range of meaning in the original Chinese, so rather than try, I published my translation side by side with a transliteration of the original Chinese so that my readers could see the source material and how I tried to adapt it. From my point of view, any translation or adaptation of Sun Tzu from the Chinese is just an example, just showing one possible interpretation of his ideas rather than capturing them exactly.
All of our other adaptations for management, marketing, career building and so on are taken from the original Chinese, not our English translation.
Sonshi.com: We noticed a trend in your professional life you may have already picked up on: You usually start from scratch (e.g., learning from a Tandy computer or deciphering individual Chinese characters), but your learning curve is fast and steep because of your deep interest in the subject. We tend see this trait in accomplished entrepreneurs. Is our assessment in the ballpark? If so, is it a learned trait or something that is innate?
Gagliardi: I think that appearance of starting from scratch is misleading. What is really happening is that I see opportunities that play into areas where I have developed past experience. For example, the move to Tandy was a dramatic change from Bic, but it was at Bic that I first began developing an interest in computers. The jump from Japanese Kanji to Chinese was not that large. Again, Sun Tzu teaches to make small, local, quick moves into new areas and see if they pay off, following the Listen-Aim-Move-Claim cycle.
What is different is the focus on an area that does pay-off. When something works, I tend to focus on it and do more of it. I didn't start off translating Sun Tzu out of some intellectual curiosity. I used these ideas for decades before I reached the point where actually doing the work of translation made sense, both practically and professionally. It is the constant progress, the constant search for new things to learn, new goals, new movements, and new positions that brings you to the point. Little movements forward accumulate mightily over time.
Sonshi.com: You have gone on countless radio interviews to share with listeners your expertise in the Art of War, especially on the subject of terrorism. Your new book, Strategy against Terror, discusses the current global fight against terrorism. Would you mind sharing with our readers the top three things every world citizen should know about terrorism?
Gagliardi: First, using Sun Tzu's methods, you can clearly define terrorism, separating it from other forms of violence. Terrorism is unique because it is INTENTIONALLY aimed at innocent people. Terrorists attack innocents for three reasons. First, the terrorist's enemies care more about innocent people than the terrorists do. Second, by attacking innocents, terrorists appear stronger than they are because they are relative stronger than an civilian who is carrying a baby instead of a gun. Third, by attacking innocents, terrorists are rewarded in the media with free advertising and, occasionally, by their opponents, who are willing to pay blackmail. This financial aspect of terrorism is very important in Sun Tzu's analysis identifying the real battleground.
Second, terrorism is an ancient tradition in the Islamic world (not a modern occurrence) but it is NOT a religious movement. The first "fundamentalist" Islamic radicals were the Karjarites who killed Ali, the fourth caliph in the eighth century. Since then, these movements have operated more or less continually in the Islamic world and have nothing to do with America, imperialism, or anything else. These movements are about power, not religion. If you read, for example, Al Qaeda's training manuals, they don't suggest recruiting among the religious. Smugglers are on top of their list. The use of Islam is cynical at best and, in most cases, heretical since terrorists claim to speak and act for God.
Finally, terrorism can be defeated. Within Sun Tzu's five categories, terrorism is a method of making war. All methods find their utility in a certain combination of factors. Given the right opposing strategy, terrorism can become as ineffective as the Greek phalanx or the British horse charge. The movement toward democracy in the Middle East makes the divide between the terrorists and the common people completely clear. In opposing democracy, the terrorists are making goal of ruling in the name of God complete clear to everyone in the region. The assumption is, of course, that God doesn't speak through the will of the whole Muslim community (the Umma) as expressed in a democracy but through the terrorists alone. In a region historically torn by many groups who have claimed the "one true version of Islam" democracy offers the only final cure for terrorism.
Sonshi.com: We will switch gears a bit and talk about balancing personal life and business life. On the Sonshi Forum, there was a discussion about Ayn Rand and how she thought the professional career comes first and then the family. Do you agree? What are your thoughts on the subject?
Gagliardi: No, I completely disagree. For me, my family will always come before my professional career. Again, as Sun Tzu teaches, everything starts with your philosophy. My philosophy is to put real with whom I have real long-term relationships first. I have organized my life around that goal.
As someone who built up a large company, I can tell you that that kind of success ends up taking control of your life. You are responsible to so many people, most of whom you don't even know personally that you have no personal life. You cannot live your life for "society" because society is just an intellectual idea, something you create in your own head. It isn't real. It doesn't have a soul.
Sonshi.com: What's next for Gary Gagliardi?
Gagliardi: New explorations, as always. In the immediate future, I am working on a new work (The Golden Key to Strategy) in which I will try to popularize Sun Tzu strategic lessons by putting them into a more appealing framework. The idea of "war" turns off a lot of people who could potentially use these ideas.
This fall, I will be releasing a new book which gets away from the framework of The Art of War and the military terminology and presents Sun Tzu's strategy in a more entertaining and easily digestible form.
I have done some work on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and its "equations" that I may release as an "Ancient Chinese Revealed" version.
In the longer term, I am working on a project explaining the ancient Greek of Christ's words in the Gospel and how the ancient Greek differs from our English translations. I am actually doing this work on a blog, www.christwords.com, so people can see what I am doing everyday.
[End of interview]
Perhaps we should look at the results to more accurately describe Mr. Gagliardi. A college dropout and unemployed as a young man until he discovered Sun Tzu. He then went on to help develop several businesses before selling FourGen, an accounting software company, to become a multimillionaire. He has since devoted his life expounding the concepts of the Art of War so others can achieve their goals as well.
Gary Gagliardi is not without controversy. We had a difficult time trying to reconcile our interview with him and his less-than-kind comments he made on his website about some of the authors we previously interviewed. Regardless, we believe everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Our purpose at Sonshi.com is not to act as a censor but a disseminator of varied and thus more complete knowledge of Sun Tzu.
You will find the following discussion with Mr. Gagliardi quite enlightening, especially if you are starting out in your career or want to learn more about our current situation with terrorism. His answer to balancing work and family is 100 percent correct. We are therefore grateful for him sharing his experiences so readers can benefit from his life lessons.
Sonshi.com: We ask this question to almost all of our honored guests: How did you first learn about Sun Tzu and what was it about his Art of War book you found interesting and/or useful? Did your family's military background fuel your interest?
Gagliardi: I was given a copy of the Art of War by my sister as a birthday present. I was an aimless college dropout at the time, having held four jobs in four years and been fired from a couple of them. I was in sales and saw almost immediately how Sun Tzu's ideas could be applied to the mistakes that I was making in selling. As I began applying these principles, my fortunes began to change.
My family's background in the military (both my father and mother were in the Army Air Corp and I was born on a military base in Alaska) probably disposed me to be interested in strategy, but my interest was really fueled by more immediate and practical considerations.
Sonshi.com: So you started out in sales and after a few rough years, success began with your rapid ascension at Bic Pen. All this in your twenties. How did Sun Tzu principles help you early in your career?
Gagliardi: Sun Tzu's principles guided me in two different ways. First, they helped me become more successful in sales. Secondly, they showed me how to transform that sales success into career advancement, first within Bic and then within Tandy Corporation. However, the two are very much connected.
Sun Tzu taught me a specific method of addressing challenges, what I call the listen-aim-move-claim cycle. For example, at Bic, I initially had a problem with my bosses, but following Sun Tzu's prescription, my first reaction was to LISTEN and learn about his situation.
Among the many things I learned was that he was personally frustrated with having to learn about computers, which were becoming more important in the ordering cycle in the late 19070s. Since I had some training in college in computers, I saw this as an opportunity to improve our relationships and made it my AIM to help him in this area. I MOVED into a position where I began helping him understand the various new computer reports. This allowed me to CLAIM a new position within BIC.
Actually, my knowledge of computers allowed me to become their Sales Manager of the Year in 1977 and later led directly to my career in computers and starting my own software company.
Sonshi.com: You had tremendous success in your next project, what later became FourGen Software -- featured twice by Inc. Magazine as America's fasting growing companies. Please share with our readers a story or two about your time at FourGen, and how Sun Tzu was applicable in the competitive marketplace.
Gagliardi: As our software company grew, I realized that if our success was to continue, I had to communicate my understanding of Sun Tzu's principles to our salespeople. By this time, I had learned that most people had a difficult time translating Sun Tzu's ideas from their military context to the context of everyday business competition. So, I did my first adaptation of Sun Tzu, The Art of Sales, for my company's own sales people.
The effects of this book were much broader than just putting the company onto the INC. 500 list of fastest-growing companies. Our sales guys started passing out copies of this book to our customers, which were companies such as AT&T, GE, and Motorola. They in turn started inviting me to speak on Sun Tzu at their conferences. Our position in the high-tech arena as proponents of Sun Tzu's strategic principles even became a publicity advantage: PC Week did a whole inside section about our use of Sun Tzu's philosophy in business.
Sun Tzu's influence was woven deeply into the nature of our company and its software. One of Sun Tzu's central principles is that rigid plans don't work. Instead, successful competitors must be able to quickly adjust to changes in their competitive situation.
However, as computer software became more integral to company operations, we saw that it tends to set company procedures in stone: making them impossible to change as the marketplace evolved. We built our software an entirely different way so that it was easy to change as needs evolved. We called this concept "modifiability by design." This concept was the basis of our success and based directly on Sun Tzu's principles.
Sonshi.com: After you sold FourGen, you started to seriously study Sun Tzu's Art of War straight from the source -- translating the work from the Chinese. We bet it was a very rewarding experience (which later led to numerous books in your Art of War Book Series by Clearbridge Publishing). What prompted you to research more into The Art of War?
Gagliardi: Well, despite selling our software company, I was still being invited all over the world to talk about Sun Tzu's principles and their application in business. However, I had always been very unhappy with all the contradictions and conflicts in the English translations of The Art of War.
I had about ten different English translations and they certainly didn't agree with one another. Even worse, almost all were internally inconsistent, where Sun Tzu seemed to say one thing in one place and contradict that statement in another. Languages have always been my hobby and, at the time, I had spent about three years studying written Japanese, so I had some grounding in the Kanji character set that is shared with Chinese.
However, I discovered that ancient Chinese is a language unto itself, written more conceptually (or poetically, as some prefer) than any modern spoken language. Fortunately, I also have a bit of a background in mathematics and physics and I immediately saw the similarities between The Art of War and classical Greek mathematics, especially Euclid (I also study ancient Greek).
With my background in using Sun Tzu's concepts successfully in business competition with years of explaining these ideas to others, I was better positioned to interpret Sun Tzu's equations than someone who was a linguist alone. I started with the assumption that Sun Tzu didn't contradict himself so, if there was a contradiction in the translation, the problem was with the translation, not the original.
I also had the advantage of working from a complete compilation of Sun Tzu various textual traditions created by the University of Taipei, so I had a more complete source document that many other English translators and a number of Chinese dictionaries on the Internet for doing research and on-line versions of other texts from the period (such as the Tao Te Ching).
One of the conclusions I came to was that no English translation could capture the range of meaning in the original Chinese, so rather than try, I published my translation side by side with a transliteration of the original Chinese so that my readers could see the source material and how I tried to adapt it. From my point of view, any translation or adaptation of Sun Tzu from the Chinese is just an example, just showing one possible interpretation of his ideas rather than capturing them exactly.
All of our other adaptations for management, marketing, career building and so on are taken from the original Chinese, not our English translation.
Sonshi.com: We noticed a trend in your professional life you may have already picked up on: You usually start from scratch (e.g., learning from a Tandy computer or deciphering individual Chinese characters), but your learning curve is fast and steep because of your deep interest in the subject. We tend see this trait in accomplished entrepreneurs. Is our assessment in the ballpark? If so, is it a learned trait or something that is innate?
Gagliardi: I think that appearance of starting from scratch is misleading. What is really happening is that I see opportunities that play into areas where I have developed past experience. For example, the move to Tandy was a dramatic change from Bic, but it was at Bic that I first began developing an interest in computers. The jump from Japanese Kanji to Chinese was not that large. Again, Sun Tzu teaches to make small, local, quick moves into new areas and see if they pay off, following the Listen-Aim-Move-Claim cycle.
What is different is the focus on an area that does pay-off. When something works, I tend to focus on it and do more of it. I didn't start off translating Sun Tzu out of some intellectual curiosity. I used these ideas for decades before I reached the point where actually doing the work of translation made sense, both practically and professionally. It is the constant progress, the constant search for new things to learn, new goals, new movements, and new positions that brings you to the point. Little movements forward accumulate mightily over time.
Sonshi.com: You have gone on countless radio interviews to share with listeners your expertise in the Art of War, especially on the subject of terrorism. Your new book, Strategy against Terror, discusses the current global fight against terrorism. Would you mind sharing with our readers the top three things every world citizen should know about terrorism?
Gagliardi: First, using Sun Tzu's methods, you can clearly define terrorism, separating it from other forms of violence. Terrorism is unique because it is INTENTIONALLY aimed at innocent people. Terrorists attack innocents for three reasons. First, the terrorist's enemies care more about innocent people than the terrorists do. Second, by attacking innocents, terrorists appear stronger than they are because they are relative stronger than an civilian who is carrying a baby instead of a gun. Third, by attacking innocents, terrorists are rewarded in the media with free advertising and, occasionally, by their opponents, who are willing to pay blackmail. This financial aspect of terrorism is very important in Sun Tzu's analysis identifying the real battleground.
Second, terrorism is an ancient tradition in the Islamic world (not a modern occurrence) but it is NOT a religious movement. The first "fundamentalist" Islamic radicals were the Karjarites who killed Ali, the fourth caliph in the eighth century. Since then, these movements have operated more or less continually in the Islamic world and have nothing to do with America, imperialism, or anything else. These movements are about power, not religion. If you read, for example, Al Qaeda's training manuals, they don't suggest recruiting among the religious. Smugglers are on top of their list. The use of Islam is cynical at best and, in most cases, heretical since terrorists claim to speak and act for God.
Finally, terrorism can be defeated. Within Sun Tzu's five categories, terrorism is a method of making war. All methods find their utility in a certain combination of factors. Given the right opposing strategy, terrorism can become as ineffective as the Greek phalanx or the British horse charge. The movement toward democracy in the Middle East makes the divide between the terrorists and the common people completely clear. In opposing democracy, the terrorists are making goal of ruling in the name of God complete clear to everyone in the region. The assumption is, of course, that God doesn't speak through the will of the whole Muslim community (the Umma) as expressed in a democracy but through the terrorists alone. In a region historically torn by many groups who have claimed the "one true version of Islam" democracy offers the only final cure for terrorism.
Sonshi.com: We will switch gears a bit and talk about balancing personal life and business life. On the Sonshi Forum, there was a discussion about Ayn Rand and how she thought the professional career comes first and then the family. Do you agree? What are your thoughts on the subject?
Gagliardi: No, I completely disagree. For me, my family will always come before my professional career. Again, as Sun Tzu teaches, everything starts with your philosophy. My philosophy is to put real with whom I have real long-term relationships first. I have organized my life around that goal.
As someone who built up a large company, I can tell you that that kind of success ends up taking control of your life. You are responsible to so many people, most of whom you don't even know personally that you have no personal life. You cannot live your life for "society" because society is just an intellectual idea, something you create in your own head. It isn't real. It doesn't have a soul.
Sonshi.com: What's next for Gary Gagliardi?
Gagliardi: New explorations, as always. In the immediate future, I am working on a new work (The Golden Key to Strategy) in which I will try to popularize Sun Tzu strategic lessons by putting them into a more appealing framework. The idea of "war" turns off a lot of people who could potentially use these ideas.
This fall, I will be releasing a new book which gets away from the framework of The Art of War and the military terminology and presents Sun Tzu's strategy in a more entertaining and easily digestible form.
I have done some work on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and its "equations" that I may release as an "Ancient Chinese Revealed" version.
In the longer term, I am working on a project explaining the ancient Greek of Christ's words in the Gospel and how the ancient Greek differs from our English translations. I am actually doing this work on a blog, www.christwords.com, so people can see what I am doing everyday.
[End of interview]