Not A Battlefield

Question: 

Why would you apply the Art of War to business? Isn't the idea that everything in life is a battle counter productive to actual progress? Life isn't a battle field.

Gary's Answer: 

Exactly Sun Tzu's point. His method is called "winning without conflict". The idea is avoiding fights. However, everything is competition and there is no avoiding that. 

In reading Sun Tzu, you will not know if the Chinese military in the 500 BC fought will Billy clubs or bazookas, on horseback or in tanks because he only deals with the one critical weapon in competition: the human mind.

One of the things Sun Tzu does is define all of his terms very specifically. We use military terms for many of his ideas because he wrote his work in the context of military competition. The term for battle, for example, is defined specifically at the time and place where you are compared to your rivals. You want to win those battles in the human mind so they do not have to be won on the battlefield. He taught that the wise general did not fight and win a hundred battles, but won without fighting a single battle. 

The method he taught was that, instead of tearing down the positions of others, you build up your position so that others would rather join you than fight you. However, most importantly, you don't want them to ignore you.