Overview
This chapter moves the discussion of strategic confrontations one step
further. “Battle" means meeting a challenge or a competitor, but it doesn't
necessarily mean conflict. This chapter tackles the specific topic of
avoiding conflict or, if it cannot be avoided, dealing with it successfully.
Without understanding strategy, most people think that war or competition
consists of only one thing: dealing with hostile, violent confrontations.
Sun Tzu called this particular type of competition “armed conflict.” Unlike
most people, he did not consider it the central fixture of warfare.
Strategic warfare means advancing our position, not conflict. In his era and
in ours, people mistake the art of war as the art of fighting. They focus
too much of their thinking on direct, violent conflict. They confuse
fighting with winning. Sun Tzu addresses these misconceptions in this
chapter.
In the everyday world, we don’t often come to blows with our opponents,
but we do have direct, hostile confrontations, which are the modern
equivalent of armed conflict. Everyday commerce requires us to face a host
of unpleasant, painful confrontations. We have to fire people. We have to
deny people what they want. We have lawsuits. We sometimes have to face
competitors directly in a sales competition and stop them. What should our
attitude toward these hostile confrontations be?
Sun Tzu always wants us to keep our focus on the real prize of strategy:
success. Do direct confrontations help us find success or do they hurt us?
What is our goal when we get into a confrontation? What are we trying to
accomplish? Is the hostile confrontation truly unavoidable? If so, what are
the important issues in managing the confrontation? How do we make sure that
the confrontation ends successfully? These are the questions that are
addressed in this chapter.
Sun Tzu’s chapter on analysis provides the keys to identifying winning
situations. Our goal here is to understand our situations so we can predict
where we can win and where we cannot.
