Robert Cantrell interview
Over the years, we have seen countless analyses of The Art of War from a myriad of articles and books. Some analyses were superficial -- just enough to back up an often equally superficial point -- and a few were based on apparent misquotes or distortions of Sun Tzu's ideas. Most of what we read were, well, mediocre. Rarely do we see an original, intelligent discussion that makes us do double takes to concentrate and think more about what we just read. Robert L. Cantrell's Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War does just that.
We were fortunate to spend some time with Mr. Cantrell to discuss more about his background, experiences, and, of course, his exceptional book. First, a little about him.
Robert Cantrell is the founder of Center For Advantage, based in Arlington, Virginia, where he works to make complex ideas easy for strategists to understand and use. His professional background is in consulting and sales, and includes prior employment at IBM/ROLM, Dean Witter, Thomson Information, and Manning & Napier. In addition to his business experience, Robert was an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) and 11th Group Special Forces (Reserve).
His academic background includes undergraduate degrees in Biology and Military Science from Duke University and an MBA from Edinburgh Business School, UK. He has given several hundred presentations and workshops on competitive strategy and competitive intelligence at companies and at conferences around the world.
To learn more about Mr. Cantrell and his works, go to www.artofwarsuntzu.com. Below is our interview with him.
Sonshi.com: How did you first learn about Sun Tzu's Art of War? What was it about the book you found useful to continue your study?
Cantrell: I first learned about Sun Tzu's Art of War when it appeared on my desk in an ROTC military strategy class alongside Clausewitz's On War and Liddell Hart's book,Strategy. Although my instructor actually spent more time in class on the latter two books, Sun Tzu's Art of War proved the most useful to me throughout my time in service. I always had a copy available to complement another book called the Ranger Handbookthat all infantry officers carry into the field.
The Ranger Handbook provides practical guidance in how to do things, for example, how to set up an ambush or cross a river. Sun Tzu's Art of War provides guidance on how to think so you can better select where, when, and why to set up that ambush or cross that river.
I became an advocate of Sun Tzu's Art of War early on while still in ROTC as the Cadet Training Commander. A Special Forces sergeant, also training to be an officer in the class behind me, turned a field exercise I had specifically designed for him to lose into a complete rout of an opposing force three times his size.
His use of a bait and trap deception so visibly affected our Vietnam veteran Master Sergeant that he gave us the most intense and heartfelt after action review I ever heard from anyone, period. The Special Forces sergeant's technique was right out of the Art of War, and I became all the more a student of the book as I moved from my cadet training out into the real world.
Sonshi.com: Based on your experience as an infantry platoon leader for the 101st Airborne Division and as a business consultant after having worked for IBM and Dean Witter, do you think .business is war.? How is the conduct of warfare similar or dissimilar to commerce?
Cantrell: Chinese philosophy describes the Yin and the Yang as coexisting opposites where one can take the form of the other to meet changing circumstances. In my viewpoint, war and business are opposite sides of a collective force that is national or individual power where one side can and does take the form of the other as circumstances change. Both business and war involve competition for resources, competition to champion ideas, or both. Business services as a constructive aspect of force, but can become destructive. War serves as a destructive aspect of force, but can become constructive.
Whether through business, war, or some combination of the two, the winners gain the most resources and the widest adoption of their ideas, while the losers have fewer resources and a more restricted distribution of their ideas. So in short, I view business and war as less distinct than many people might like to believe. It helps to explain why, even in developed countries, the champions of business must have bodyguards that may appear in the form of attorneys, accountants, or a protector by their car with a gun.
What does this mean to the individual in business? It means that though you succeed in business by helping other people also succeed, the better you do, the more likely you will find someone else, perhaps even one of your allies, going after your interests. In some parts of the world, people may even do so at gunpoint, though fortunately, the launch of competing products and legal challenges is the more expected norm. In all cases, you seek to temper your opposition, however it appears, without it hindering your progress and success, and you always stay aware.
When I worked at Dean Witter in New York City, for example, I apparently had the plans of Al Qaeda operatives as well as the plans of other brokerages set to work against the company that employed me. Since I still viewed war and business as distinct at that time, I did not give much thought to the former until the threat revealed itself. Success, or even your proximity to success, always makes you a target to those who oppose that success, however they choose to fight you. That is why understanding Sun Tzu's Art of War can prove advantageous to just about anyone.
Sonshi.com: You wrote one of the most profound books we have read in a long time: Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War. Why did you decide to write it?
Cantrell: The reason for writing Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War actually shifted a couple of times during the project. The project started with a book draft titledThe Art of Commerce that my agent, Ken Atchity, marketed during the height of the Internet boom in 1999. This project stemmed from my experiences at IBM/ROLM and a Dean Witter joint venture where errors in management -- one that would even appear in a later case study for my MBA -- had cost me a lot financially.
I wanted to set some guidelines to help me and others not commit those same errors. Commercially, the project also appeared an interesting way to pursue a hot market for business publications, and it leveraged a genuine and long standing interest in Sun Tzu. The publishers, however, said that the book read a lot like Sun Tzu, and the world already had Sun Tzu.
In 2000, Ken and I decided that I should take a different angle and focus on helping people understand Sun Tzu. This seemed the best way to turn the research done for The Art of Commerce into a viable project. I wrote a draft as a documentary script, and have since posted some of the storyboards used for that concept on my Web site at http://www.artofwarsuntzu.com/Storyboards.htm.
The project became more important to me personally a year later. I was in my car close to the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11th, 2001, and I spent much of the morning on site. That afternoon I saw the twin towers, where I had spent a lot of time a few years earlier, collapse on television. By chance, I had written the words "Naivety can kill your finest" in the script section about invulnerability some months earlier. Shortly thereafter, Ken's staff determined the documentary, as written, would take a million dollars to produce that we would not likely find, and we decided I would rewrite the script as a book with more serious undertones brought about by the current events.
In the fall of 2002, I finished the book draft and had the National Defense University review it. It immediately became a part of their curriculum in that rough draft form, so I was pretty sure I had it right. Since I had already had to make a couple of changes relating to the events in Afghanistan -- I originally said the use of horses by modern armies had long since gone by the wayside -- I entered a race against time to get the book out before (and if) we invaded Iraq. I did not want to be compelled to comment on an event the effects of which, even if it went exactly according to plan, we could not know historically for years.
As it turned out, the wholesaler, Ingram, received the first batch of Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War the day after the invasion began. Some listings of Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War have a publication date of 2004, but this actually corresponds to the date National Book Networks took over the role as distributor a year after first publication.
Sonshi.com: An extremely observant point in the book was the link you made between the physics equation Force = (Mass x velocity)/Time and a falcon on the hunt. Please explain to our readers this concept, because they will get an idea of other unique insights in your book.
Cantrell: Sun Tzu deals with very practical aspects of fighting. Relating the falcon from the Art of War to the above physics equation -- even though Sun Tzu would not have known this actual equation -- illustrates the book's practicality. On the pure physical level, the falcon uses the mass of its body and the speed of its dive to strike whatever rodent or bird it chooses to strike. Soldiers would recognize the falcon on the hunt.
By relating the soldiers' efforts to the falcon, Sun Tzu brought the power of this physics equation to life beyond any discussion of an actual equation. And although Sun Tzu discussed many cunning ways to deal with an enemy, even Sun Tzu noted practical truths that the laws of physics explain such as the truth that a large enough force can simply overwhelm a smaller force.
Part of understanding Sun Tzu's ideas involves relating them to other ideas, not the least of which include mathematical and scientific tenants found in physics. I have always taken interest that, along with military strategists, a most enthusiastic group of advocates for Sun Tzu's ideas include bright and creative high-tech types that I can picture reading books on Chaos Theory just for fun.
The common link between the two types, I believe, is an interest and capacity to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in a decisive manner. To the extent that people have this capacity in any profession, those individuals tend also to find Sun Tzu's Art of War a topic of interest. Sun Tzu's Art of War describes a way to manage uncertainty for advantage.
Sonshi.com: You often weaved in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching text into your analysis. Why did you choose to do so?
Cantrell: I wrote Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War with the specific intent to make the text understandable without compromising the subtlety of thought needed to master it. To achieve this goal, I set out to interpret Sun Tzu's Art of War in context with Sun Tzu's own source philosophy, Taoism, and present six underlying principles of theArt of War that Sun Tzu's Art of War in turn puts into context.
Professional instructors understand this upper and lower tiered method of interpretation, where the system you explain lies between two other related systems, to be the very best way to explain complex ideas. To understand the importance of this method, consider how difficult it would be to explain to an outsider the concept of words without putting the system of words into context with the system of sentences above words and the system of letters below them. You would have a hard time doing so.
According to Gödel's Proof, it is mathematically impossible to describe a system in context with itself. Sun Tzu's Art of War is a system. The literal translation of the title in Chinese is .Sun Tzu (on) War Methods.. Many authors try to explain Sun Tzu's Art of War in context with itself. Some do better than others, but I wanted improve the results. So I entered Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching into the Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War project.
Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the cornerstone document of the Taoist philosophy, a philosophy that influenced Sun Tzu's work. All the illustrations found in the Art of War, the dual nature of water as hard and soft, how to find strength through flexibility, and the core philosophy of fighting only when it is absolutely necessary, have roots in Taoism. All these ideas appear in the Tao Te Ching.
To succeed with the goal of making Sun Tzu understandable, I found it important to put Sun Tzu's philosophies into context with their Taoist origin, and in some cases to go further and put both Sun Tzu's Art of War and the Tao Te Ching into context with the natural world that forms a cornerstone of Taoist philosophy. Therefore, I weaved intoUnderstanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War important connections with Sun Tzu's Art of War and Taoist philosophy through the use of the Tao Te Ching.
Of course I took a risk in doing so, considering that one of my intended audiences was a very pragmatic military. But based on the book's adoption by most of the war colleges, it seems to have worked. Early on in the book I point out that the phrase .turn the other cheek. has meaning to Westerners that might be lost on Easterners culturally unfamiliar with the biblical source of that phrase, and that Westerners might find comparable ideas from Sun Tzu's Art of War difficult to grasp without knowing references from the Tao Te Ching.
I also made a point that the philosophy of the Jedi, in the popular Star Wars movies, has Taoist influences similar to those found in the Art of War. From reader comments I have received, that Star Wars link serves as a solid anchor for those more pragmatic people venturing into new philosophical territory.
Sonshi.com: We very much enjoyed how you gave relatively modern examples in warfare (e.g., D-Day, Pickett's Charge, Battle of the Bulge, Cowpens) and how Sun Tzu's principles applied to each battle. Do you believe that if both sides were to have read Sun Tzu that many lives would have spared -- as arguably in the case of the Cold War which you also discussed?
Cantrell: Sun Tzu's Art of War is so easy to misinterpret, that it's hard to say, if both sides had read the book, whether their knowledge might have made things better or worse. After all, the topic is war, and war carries with it with all its attendant ambiguities.
The question for me involves more so the temperament of the leaders reading the Art of War and whether they could have used Sun Tzu's ideas to obtain their objectives without, perhaps, going to war in the first place; whether better recognition of respective positions might prevent a war both sides should know they would lose; or conversely whether the knowledge in Sun Tzu's Art of War might actually spur the confidence in one side or the other to give war a try.
This issue of temperament is one of the reasons I included the American Civil War case example on Grant's bloody 1864-65 campaign to defeat Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. This case example illustrates that an application of a Sun Tzu principle -- in this case using the strength that Grant could replace lost troops against the weakness that Lee could not -- does not necessarily mean generating few or fewer casualties, particularly if both sides maintain they still have a chance to win. War is war, and those who choose or find it necessary to prosecute a war will usually have and cause more casualties than they expected.
Sun Tzu cautions against war unless it is absolutely necessary. Though you might find a way to defeat an enemy with few casualties, you can just as easily destroy their side and your own if things do not go according to plan. It is against human nature, particularly if attacked, not to fight through a lost cause in hopes that an enemy will quit or make a mistake; and this makes any reliance on breaking an enemy's will to fight dangerous -- as the Japanese learned after Pearl Harbor -- without also having the capacity to destroy him.
To further illustrate, watch how people play chess. Very few people have the discipline to resign an inevitably lost game without playing the game to its bitter end. To the extent that chess masters recognize winning and losing positions better than amateurs, the discipline to surrender a lost game, if offered the opportunity, is higher. However, so is the possibility that neither master will gain the upper hand until the very last pieces remain standing on the board. Either comparable result is possible in war if both opponents in war have a mastery of Sun Tzu's principles.
Sonshi.com: We understand you offer cards or a card system that would complement your book. Can you tell us what they are and how they are useful?
Cantrell: First what they are not, which is a collection of Sun Tzu's sayings. The Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck is instead a comprehensive collection of 54 strategies derived from Sun Tzu, the Chinese 36 strategies which appear to themselves draw from Sun Tzu, plus ideas from other masters of strategy to include Boyd, Kasparov, Musashi, and T.E. Lawrence. Specific verses from Sun Tzu's Art of War support all the included strategies.
I arranged these cards in terms of hearts, preparation of the self; clubs, preparation of the battlefield; diamonds, isolation; and spades, elimination. The Aces set up the tenant that in all competitive strategy you seek to do one of four things to your adversary: eliminate, isolate, integrate, or negate him. Your method to accomplish any of these might include the application of the other three. For example, you could literally eliminate your adversary, or you might effectively eliminate your adversary by isolating, integrating, or negating him.
The purpose of the Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck is to raise the capacity of users to compete with their rivals by raising the number of strategic possibilities available at their top-of-mind when in a conflict situation. In a crisis, people tend to fall back on a limited set of ideas, perhaps ideas that worked in the past even if not relevant for a present situation. Users that undertake a repetitive study of these cards raise their command of other strategic possibilities. Their success works in much the same way that a martial artist increases possibilities for physical combat by studying and practicing new moves until they become a part of him.
The intent of the cards, regardless of profession discipline, is to raise the capacity of users to act strategically faster than their opponents can act or react, or as the strategist and fighter pilot Boyd said, to act inside your adversary's decision cycle loop.
The National Defense University uses the Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck as part of their training curriculum. The cards apparently have taken the name .fortune cookie lessons. since instructors require officers at the school to comment on randomly drawn strategies from the deck regarding their relevance and importance to winning military conflicts.
I often train people to conduct mental sparring exercises. These exercises involve drawing five cards and, in quick time, acting and reacting to strategies opponents play against each other to train the flow of strategic thinking as players proceed through the whole deck. Of course you can also just play cards with them, which allows you to gain familiarity with the strategies repetitively seen in the background. This latter is the concept behind the military's long standing use of playing cards in aircraft vehicle identification packs, plus the Iraq most wanted deck last year.
Sonshi.com: What are you working on right now, and what is next for Robert Cantrell?
Cantrell: I recently released a 170 card product with Ideation International called theInnovation Planner that uses the Theory of Inventive Principle (TRIZ) to help inventors and engineers to be more creative. Practitioners of TRIZ tend to find Sun Tzu principles easy to grasp, and visa versa. I also have another card product called The Sales Strategy Fundamentals headed into production for a September release that has undergone the scrutiny of some of the best in the business.
The next actual book I plan to release is titled Doctrine of the Orca. The tendency of Sun Tzu and his sources to base much of their observations on patterns found in the natural world intrigued me. I decided to explore the idea with a book that shows how to succeed on your own terms, in this case by using the metaphor of a wild and free Orca. I had a couple of publishers express interest in this project in 2002, but we had to drop it when Ken Blanchard came out with the book Whale Done. Blanchard's book uses Sea World trainers and captive Orcas as an analogy for business management and employees. His analogy was not the link I wanted to make, but Blanchard had used Orcas, and a lot more people know about Blanchard than me.
I think enough time has passed and enough people have had issue with the Blanchard analogy to revisit Doctrine of the Orca and take the project to completion. I have received feedback on the present draft that leaves me confident it will do well.
Sonshi.com: Thank you for your time.
Cantrell: Thank you. I very much enjoyed the interview.
[End of interview]
We were fortunate to spend some time with Mr. Cantrell to discuss more about his background, experiences, and, of course, his exceptional book. First, a little about him.
Robert Cantrell is the founder of Center For Advantage, based in Arlington, Virginia, where he works to make complex ideas easy for strategists to understand and use. His professional background is in consulting and sales, and includes prior employment at IBM/ROLM, Dean Witter, Thomson Information, and Manning & Napier. In addition to his business experience, Robert was an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) and 11th Group Special Forces (Reserve).
His academic background includes undergraduate degrees in Biology and Military Science from Duke University and an MBA from Edinburgh Business School, UK. He has given several hundred presentations and workshops on competitive strategy and competitive intelligence at companies and at conferences around the world.
To learn more about Mr. Cantrell and his works, go to www.artofwarsuntzu.com. Below is our interview with him.
Sonshi.com: How did you first learn about Sun Tzu's Art of War? What was it about the book you found useful to continue your study?
Cantrell: I first learned about Sun Tzu's Art of War when it appeared on my desk in an ROTC military strategy class alongside Clausewitz's On War and Liddell Hart's book,Strategy. Although my instructor actually spent more time in class on the latter two books, Sun Tzu's Art of War proved the most useful to me throughout my time in service. I always had a copy available to complement another book called the Ranger Handbookthat all infantry officers carry into the field.
The Ranger Handbook provides practical guidance in how to do things, for example, how to set up an ambush or cross a river. Sun Tzu's Art of War provides guidance on how to think so you can better select where, when, and why to set up that ambush or cross that river.
I became an advocate of Sun Tzu's Art of War early on while still in ROTC as the Cadet Training Commander. A Special Forces sergeant, also training to be an officer in the class behind me, turned a field exercise I had specifically designed for him to lose into a complete rout of an opposing force three times his size.
His use of a bait and trap deception so visibly affected our Vietnam veteran Master Sergeant that he gave us the most intense and heartfelt after action review I ever heard from anyone, period. The Special Forces sergeant's technique was right out of the Art of War, and I became all the more a student of the book as I moved from my cadet training out into the real world.
Sonshi.com: Based on your experience as an infantry platoon leader for the 101st Airborne Division and as a business consultant after having worked for IBM and Dean Witter, do you think .business is war.? How is the conduct of warfare similar or dissimilar to commerce?
Cantrell: Chinese philosophy describes the Yin and the Yang as coexisting opposites where one can take the form of the other to meet changing circumstances. In my viewpoint, war and business are opposite sides of a collective force that is national or individual power where one side can and does take the form of the other as circumstances change. Both business and war involve competition for resources, competition to champion ideas, or both. Business services as a constructive aspect of force, but can become destructive. War serves as a destructive aspect of force, but can become constructive.
Whether through business, war, or some combination of the two, the winners gain the most resources and the widest adoption of their ideas, while the losers have fewer resources and a more restricted distribution of their ideas. So in short, I view business and war as less distinct than many people might like to believe. It helps to explain why, even in developed countries, the champions of business must have bodyguards that may appear in the form of attorneys, accountants, or a protector by their car with a gun.
What does this mean to the individual in business? It means that though you succeed in business by helping other people also succeed, the better you do, the more likely you will find someone else, perhaps even one of your allies, going after your interests. In some parts of the world, people may even do so at gunpoint, though fortunately, the launch of competing products and legal challenges is the more expected norm. In all cases, you seek to temper your opposition, however it appears, without it hindering your progress and success, and you always stay aware.
When I worked at Dean Witter in New York City, for example, I apparently had the plans of Al Qaeda operatives as well as the plans of other brokerages set to work against the company that employed me. Since I still viewed war and business as distinct at that time, I did not give much thought to the former until the threat revealed itself. Success, or even your proximity to success, always makes you a target to those who oppose that success, however they choose to fight you. That is why understanding Sun Tzu's Art of War can prove advantageous to just about anyone.
Sonshi.com: You wrote one of the most profound books we have read in a long time: Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War. Why did you decide to write it?
Cantrell: The reason for writing Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War actually shifted a couple of times during the project. The project started with a book draft titledThe Art of Commerce that my agent, Ken Atchity, marketed during the height of the Internet boom in 1999. This project stemmed from my experiences at IBM/ROLM and a Dean Witter joint venture where errors in management -- one that would even appear in a later case study for my MBA -- had cost me a lot financially.
I wanted to set some guidelines to help me and others not commit those same errors. Commercially, the project also appeared an interesting way to pursue a hot market for business publications, and it leveraged a genuine and long standing interest in Sun Tzu. The publishers, however, said that the book read a lot like Sun Tzu, and the world already had Sun Tzu.
In 2000, Ken and I decided that I should take a different angle and focus on helping people understand Sun Tzu. This seemed the best way to turn the research done for The Art of Commerce into a viable project. I wrote a draft as a documentary script, and have since posted some of the storyboards used for that concept on my Web site at http://www.artofwarsuntzu.com/Storyboards.htm.
The project became more important to me personally a year later. I was in my car close to the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11th, 2001, and I spent much of the morning on site. That afternoon I saw the twin towers, where I had spent a lot of time a few years earlier, collapse on television. By chance, I had written the words "Naivety can kill your finest" in the script section about invulnerability some months earlier. Shortly thereafter, Ken's staff determined the documentary, as written, would take a million dollars to produce that we would not likely find, and we decided I would rewrite the script as a book with more serious undertones brought about by the current events.
In the fall of 2002, I finished the book draft and had the National Defense University review it. It immediately became a part of their curriculum in that rough draft form, so I was pretty sure I had it right. Since I had already had to make a couple of changes relating to the events in Afghanistan -- I originally said the use of horses by modern armies had long since gone by the wayside -- I entered a race against time to get the book out before (and if) we invaded Iraq. I did not want to be compelled to comment on an event the effects of which, even if it went exactly according to plan, we could not know historically for years.
As it turned out, the wholesaler, Ingram, received the first batch of Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War the day after the invasion began. Some listings of Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War have a publication date of 2004, but this actually corresponds to the date National Book Networks took over the role as distributor a year after first publication.
Sonshi.com: An extremely observant point in the book was the link you made between the physics equation Force = (Mass x velocity)/Time and a falcon on the hunt. Please explain to our readers this concept, because they will get an idea of other unique insights in your book.
Cantrell: Sun Tzu deals with very practical aspects of fighting. Relating the falcon from the Art of War to the above physics equation -- even though Sun Tzu would not have known this actual equation -- illustrates the book's practicality. On the pure physical level, the falcon uses the mass of its body and the speed of its dive to strike whatever rodent or bird it chooses to strike. Soldiers would recognize the falcon on the hunt.
By relating the soldiers' efforts to the falcon, Sun Tzu brought the power of this physics equation to life beyond any discussion of an actual equation. And although Sun Tzu discussed many cunning ways to deal with an enemy, even Sun Tzu noted practical truths that the laws of physics explain such as the truth that a large enough force can simply overwhelm a smaller force.
Part of understanding Sun Tzu's ideas involves relating them to other ideas, not the least of which include mathematical and scientific tenants found in physics. I have always taken interest that, along with military strategists, a most enthusiastic group of advocates for Sun Tzu's ideas include bright and creative high-tech types that I can picture reading books on Chaos Theory just for fun.
The common link between the two types, I believe, is an interest and capacity to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in a decisive manner. To the extent that people have this capacity in any profession, those individuals tend also to find Sun Tzu's Art of War a topic of interest. Sun Tzu's Art of War describes a way to manage uncertainty for advantage.
Sonshi.com: You often weaved in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching text into your analysis. Why did you choose to do so?
Cantrell: I wrote Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War with the specific intent to make the text understandable without compromising the subtlety of thought needed to master it. To achieve this goal, I set out to interpret Sun Tzu's Art of War in context with Sun Tzu's own source philosophy, Taoism, and present six underlying principles of theArt of War that Sun Tzu's Art of War in turn puts into context.
Professional instructors understand this upper and lower tiered method of interpretation, where the system you explain lies between two other related systems, to be the very best way to explain complex ideas. To understand the importance of this method, consider how difficult it would be to explain to an outsider the concept of words without putting the system of words into context with the system of sentences above words and the system of letters below them. You would have a hard time doing so.
According to Gödel's Proof, it is mathematically impossible to describe a system in context with itself. Sun Tzu's Art of War is a system. The literal translation of the title in Chinese is .Sun Tzu (on) War Methods.. Many authors try to explain Sun Tzu's Art of War in context with itself. Some do better than others, but I wanted improve the results. So I entered Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching into the Understanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War project.
Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the cornerstone document of the Taoist philosophy, a philosophy that influenced Sun Tzu's work. All the illustrations found in the Art of War, the dual nature of water as hard and soft, how to find strength through flexibility, and the core philosophy of fighting only when it is absolutely necessary, have roots in Taoism. All these ideas appear in the Tao Te Ching.
To succeed with the goal of making Sun Tzu understandable, I found it important to put Sun Tzu's philosophies into context with their Taoist origin, and in some cases to go further and put both Sun Tzu's Art of War and the Tao Te Ching into context with the natural world that forms a cornerstone of Taoist philosophy. Therefore, I weaved intoUnderstanding Sun Tzu on the Art of War important connections with Sun Tzu's Art of War and Taoist philosophy through the use of the Tao Te Ching.
Of course I took a risk in doing so, considering that one of my intended audiences was a very pragmatic military. But based on the book's adoption by most of the war colleges, it seems to have worked. Early on in the book I point out that the phrase .turn the other cheek. has meaning to Westerners that might be lost on Easterners culturally unfamiliar with the biblical source of that phrase, and that Westerners might find comparable ideas from Sun Tzu's Art of War difficult to grasp without knowing references from the Tao Te Ching.
I also made a point that the philosophy of the Jedi, in the popular Star Wars movies, has Taoist influences similar to those found in the Art of War. From reader comments I have received, that Star Wars link serves as a solid anchor for those more pragmatic people venturing into new philosophical territory.
Sonshi.com: We very much enjoyed how you gave relatively modern examples in warfare (e.g., D-Day, Pickett's Charge, Battle of the Bulge, Cowpens) and how Sun Tzu's principles applied to each battle. Do you believe that if both sides were to have read Sun Tzu that many lives would have spared -- as arguably in the case of the Cold War which you also discussed?
Cantrell: Sun Tzu's Art of War is so easy to misinterpret, that it's hard to say, if both sides had read the book, whether their knowledge might have made things better or worse. After all, the topic is war, and war carries with it with all its attendant ambiguities.
The question for me involves more so the temperament of the leaders reading the Art of War and whether they could have used Sun Tzu's ideas to obtain their objectives without, perhaps, going to war in the first place; whether better recognition of respective positions might prevent a war both sides should know they would lose; or conversely whether the knowledge in Sun Tzu's Art of War might actually spur the confidence in one side or the other to give war a try.
This issue of temperament is one of the reasons I included the American Civil War case example on Grant's bloody 1864-65 campaign to defeat Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. This case example illustrates that an application of a Sun Tzu principle -- in this case using the strength that Grant could replace lost troops against the weakness that Lee could not -- does not necessarily mean generating few or fewer casualties, particularly if both sides maintain they still have a chance to win. War is war, and those who choose or find it necessary to prosecute a war will usually have and cause more casualties than they expected.
Sun Tzu cautions against war unless it is absolutely necessary. Though you might find a way to defeat an enemy with few casualties, you can just as easily destroy their side and your own if things do not go according to plan. It is against human nature, particularly if attacked, not to fight through a lost cause in hopes that an enemy will quit or make a mistake; and this makes any reliance on breaking an enemy's will to fight dangerous -- as the Japanese learned after Pearl Harbor -- without also having the capacity to destroy him.
To further illustrate, watch how people play chess. Very few people have the discipline to resign an inevitably lost game without playing the game to its bitter end. To the extent that chess masters recognize winning and losing positions better than amateurs, the discipline to surrender a lost game, if offered the opportunity, is higher. However, so is the possibility that neither master will gain the upper hand until the very last pieces remain standing on the board. Either comparable result is possible in war if both opponents in war have a mastery of Sun Tzu's principles.
Sonshi.com: We understand you offer cards or a card system that would complement your book. Can you tell us what they are and how they are useful?
Cantrell: First what they are not, which is a collection of Sun Tzu's sayings. The Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck is instead a comprehensive collection of 54 strategies derived from Sun Tzu, the Chinese 36 strategies which appear to themselves draw from Sun Tzu, plus ideas from other masters of strategy to include Boyd, Kasparov, Musashi, and T.E. Lawrence. Specific verses from Sun Tzu's Art of War support all the included strategies.
I arranged these cards in terms of hearts, preparation of the self; clubs, preparation of the battlefield; diamonds, isolation; and spades, elimination. The Aces set up the tenant that in all competitive strategy you seek to do one of four things to your adversary: eliminate, isolate, integrate, or negate him. Your method to accomplish any of these might include the application of the other three. For example, you could literally eliminate your adversary, or you might effectively eliminate your adversary by isolating, integrating, or negating him.
The purpose of the Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck is to raise the capacity of users to compete with their rivals by raising the number of strategic possibilities available at their top-of-mind when in a conflict situation. In a crisis, people tend to fall back on a limited set of ideas, perhaps ideas that worked in the past even if not relevant for a present situation. Users that undertake a repetitive study of these cards raise their command of other strategic possibilities. Their success works in much the same way that a martial artist increases possibilities for physical combat by studying and practicing new moves until they become a part of him.
The intent of the cards, regardless of profession discipline, is to raise the capacity of users to act strategically faster than their opponents can act or react, or as the strategist and fighter pilot Boyd said, to act inside your adversary's decision cycle loop.
The National Defense University uses the Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck as part of their training curriculum. The cards apparently have taken the name .fortune cookie lessons. since instructors require officers at the school to comment on randomly drawn strategies from the deck regarding their relevance and importance to winning military conflicts.
I often train people to conduct mental sparring exercises. These exercises involve drawing five cards and, in quick time, acting and reacting to strategies opponents play against each other to train the flow of strategic thinking as players proceed through the whole deck. Of course you can also just play cards with them, which allows you to gain familiarity with the strategies repetitively seen in the background. This latter is the concept behind the military's long standing use of playing cards in aircraft vehicle identification packs, plus the Iraq most wanted deck last year.
Sonshi.com: What are you working on right now, and what is next for Robert Cantrell?
Cantrell: I recently released a 170 card product with Ideation International called theInnovation Planner that uses the Theory of Inventive Principle (TRIZ) to help inventors and engineers to be more creative. Practitioners of TRIZ tend to find Sun Tzu principles easy to grasp, and visa versa. I also have another card product called The Sales Strategy Fundamentals headed into production for a September release that has undergone the scrutiny of some of the best in the business.
The next actual book I plan to release is titled Doctrine of the Orca. The tendency of Sun Tzu and his sources to base much of their observations on patterns found in the natural world intrigued me. I decided to explore the idea with a book that shows how to succeed on your own terms, in this case by using the metaphor of a wild and free Orca. I had a couple of publishers express interest in this project in 2002, but we had to drop it when Ken Blanchard came out with the book Whale Done. Blanchard's book uses Sea World trainers and captive Orcas as an analogy for business management and employees. His analogy was not the link I wanted to make, but Blanchard had used Orcas, and a lot more people know about Blanchard than me.
I think enough time has passed and enough people have had issue with the Blanchard analogy to revisit Doctrine of the Orca and take the project to completion. I have received feedback on the present draft that leaves me confident it will do well.
Sonshi.com: Thank you for your time.
Cantrell: Thank you. I very much enjoyed the interview.
[End of interview]