Sun Tzu's military treatise,
The Art of War, is considered one of the most influential book on strategy in the world to date and it would be interesting to learn what Sun Tzu has to say about leadership. Sun Tzu begins with a chapter on
strategic assessments as follows.
"Military action is important to the nation-it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it. Therefore measure in terms of five things, use these assessments to make comparisons, and thus find out what the conditions are. The five things are the way, the weather, the terrains, the leadership, and discipline.
The way means inducing the people to have the same aim as the leadership, so that they will share death and share life, without fear of danger. The weather means the seasons. The terrain is to be assessed in terms of distance, difficulty or ease of travel, dimension, and safety. Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and sternness. Discipline means organization, chain of command, and logistics."
Note the five virtues of a leader and the order in which these virtues are stated. To understand this better consider the following commentary by Jia Lin.
"Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive sternness of command results in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a military leader."
[Above excerpts are from Thomas Cleary's translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War available at
Shambhala]
2 comments:
I didn't understand the concluding part of your article, could you please explain it more?
Perhaps it will be clearer if we consider the following commentary on the same by Du Mu.
"The way of the ancient kings was to consider humaneness foremost, while the martial artists considered intelligent foremost. This is because intelligence involves ability to plan and to know when to change effectively. Trustworthiness means to make people sure of punishment or reward. Humaneness means love and compassion for people, being aware of their toils. Courage means to seize opportunities to make certain of victory, without vacillation. Sternness means to establish discipline in the ranks by punishments.
In a way, Jia Lin's commentary in the last paragraph is saying that a leader need all these five attributes. Reliance or emphasis on only one of these can lead to undesirable circumstances. As an example, "Excessive sternness of command results in cruelty." means that if a leader is very stern and lacks humanity, cruelty will result.
BTW, my humble apologies for my tardiness. I did not have comment moderation switch on previously and missed your comment until I check recently.
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