Allan Elder sent me this news story about Hillary's recent visit to Beijiing and quoting Sun Tzu regarding our shared danger in the current crisis. The story expresses the quote from Sun Tzu as tongchuan gongji, which probably means literally "together-boat work-river." (Probably because it is impossible to translate Chinese from phonetic representation as opposed to Chinese characters.) This is the shorten proverbial form of the saying, not what actually Sun Tzu wrote.

One of our trainers asks:

I was wondering if you would expand on the concept of a philosophy at the “emotional” level. Thank you.

In one sense, all levels of the philosophy of a motivating mission are emotional because we have to care about them. However, when we discuss the four levels of mission as economic, professional, emotional, and spiritual, we specifically mean the personal one-to-one connections that tie individuals together.

Bertrand Russell, from The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 114-117

In the first part of this discussion, we examined the stragic errors that are made when you are involved in a scandal. Strategy also offers rules for when your opponents are caught in scandals. The first rule is to stay away until your opponent creates an opening for you. In the last post, we described these scandals as a media feeding frenzy, as the shark in the press are driven frantic by the smell of blood. Getting involved without an opening is like jumping into the blood filled water: you make yourself a target.

Much of traditional strategy involves looking into the future and asking yourself about people's motivations and what they are likely to respond to your actions. Though people's responses cannot be predicted exactly, some responses are more likely than others. For Obama, political scandals like the political pedaling of Gov. Blagojevich are considered environmental attacks, equivalent to Sun Tzu's fire attacks.