Economic

The Unseen Opportunity

Sun Tzu's strategy teaches that opportunities are both 1) right in front of you and 2) hard to see. Why is something that is right in front of you is hard to see? Because your perspective, which is subjective and not objective, blocks your view. As human beings, we get locked into certain views of our situations, which filter out information that doesn't fit our mindset. Sun Tzu's entire system for strategic analysis was developed to overcome this problem.

Value, Risk, and Reward

Sun Tzu taught that advancing in small, certain steps were always preferable to using larger, riskier steps. What science considers "illogical" choices are very logical when we factor in the difference between controlled environment, where planning works, and competitive environments, where strategy works. Good strategy seeks to exploit the mistakes people naturally make in calculating risk and reward. Planning assumes that the future is controllable and predictable.

Wars of Words

A war of words is a special type of positioning duel. It focuses only on the subjective part of a position, that is, what a position means in terms of the future. A war of words is a psychological war in which one party is trying to get someone else to physcially change their position based upon the information communicated. Generally, all wars of words can be broken down into two types: threats and promises. These are future punishments and rewards for acting or stopping acting in a certain way.

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