Sun Tzu taught a set of powerful methods for winning in competition. This website represents the Science of Strategy Institute's multiple award-winning work to make the strategy of The Art of War easier to use.
Sun Tzu's The Art of War sets out the rules for winning productively instead of destructively in any competitive situation. Our Warrior's Rule Book makes these lessons easier to apply to the conditions of your specific situation. Today's article is from its section about Creating Momentum. Since all articles reflect an interconnected philosophy, regular reading develops better gut instincts for successful strategy. New articles appear daily from our outline of topics.
"Influence events.
Think about opportunities in terms of methods you can control." Sun Tzu's The Art of War 1:3:4-5
"It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.” French Proverb
Leveraging the forces of our environment without know-how is impossible. Our world works because it is built on thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge. It requires work to prove which techniques, methods processes, and activities work best to accomplish a certain set of goal. As our technical knowledge has grown more complex, we each master a smaller and smaller piece of the whole. As our success at manipulating our environment has grown, more and more of us are isolated from the hard realities of nature. Complexity leads to chaos if the connections tying together our know-how are not preserved and passed down from generation to generation.
Sun Tzu's system of innovation is based upon knowing how the world works, both in production and in competition. The value of competition is that it naturally separates what works from what works better. If we focus on what has been proven to work, progress using innovation is much easy. When we must base our creativity on the thousands of years of strategic learning, it becomes fairly easy to do.
The following eight rules describe what we must understand in order to use proven methods as a basis for innovation.
