Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu is the ancient Chinese military strategist credited with The Art of War, a 2,500-year-old text on strategy that remains one of the most influential ever written.

Sun Tzu — if he existed as a single historical figure, which some scholars dispute — is credited with writing The Art of War sometime around the fifth century BCE. The text is a collection of aphorisms and strategic principles organized into thirteen short chapters, addressing everything from tactical positioning and deception to the management of intelligence and the psychology of leadership. Its influence on military thought is immeasurable, and it has been required reading in military academies across the world for centuries.

What has extended The Art of War’s reach beyond warfare is the ease with which its principles transfer to any competitive context: business strategy, negotiation, sports, and organizational management have all claimed it as a foundational text. Some of this application is illuminating; much of it is superficial. The book’s aphoristic quality — “All warfare is based on deception”; “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” — lends itself to being quoted selectively, and a great deal of popular business writing deploys Sun Tzu more as ornament than substance.

Read on its own terms, The Art of War is a genuinely remarkable document: compressed, internally consistent, and surprisingly nuanced on questions of information, flexibility, and the costs of prolonged conflict. The best modern translations, such as those by Roger Ames or the Denma Translation Group, provide the scholarly context that the text needs. At barely 70 pages in most editions, it demands less time than almost any other classic — and rewards more rereading than most.