Sun Tzu teaches that attacking others is the poorest way to make progress. In most situations, we hurt ourselves more than we hurt our opponents. This problem is illustrated by the recent ban on new fast-food restaurants in LA. While the politicians think they are attacking fast-food, they are actually rewarding them and actually giving them a pile of profits to promote their product.

Foolish ideas seem logical if they are repeated often enough. Sun Tzu's strategy teaches the use of analogies to support logic. For example, do the arguments about energy policy make sense in terms of food policy? Current food technology does a thousand times more ecological damage than any other human activity including using oil. Farming cuts down trees, plows up the land, depletes limited water resources, spreads dangerous chemicals, and intentionally poisons natural plants and animals. Using ecologically unsound food is destroying the planet.

A student who is a union member wrote to describe how the management of his railroad is decommissioning new assets despite their efficiency. This is a good example of how organizations fail to understand how methods must adjust to climate. Railroads have a rare opportunity right now. Fuel price rises are hitting their main competitors, the truckers, hard. Asset utilization is not a bad focus for a capital intensive business like railroads, but to improve utilization, what is better: removing assets or increase sales?

One of the basic principles of Sun Tzu's strategy is that the future is not predictable and that things can change, sometimes dramatically over time. However, another principle is that change tends to balance itself out over time.

We have just created a new site, called the Business War College, where we bring together a number of our materials under a little different label. Of the years of working in the book store market, I became shy about marketing "war" especially since Sun Tzu teaches winning while avoiding conflict. However, since the business world really is increasingly the focus of the world's competitive between ideas, which is a very good thing, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the fact, especially since business people are our main customers.