This award-winning book (Foreword Magazine Book of the Year, Self-Help, Finalist) transforms each stanza of Sun Tzu's work into a short lesson on competitive strategy. These lessons were developed originally as discussion points for Gary Gagliardi's workshops on Sun Tzu. The book is the basis of the Science of Strategy Institute's on-line training program going through all the lessons in the complete Art of War. Its short, easy-to-understand lessons help the reader think about the inner workings of human competition. Examples from modern business and every day life are used to illustrate what people do right and wrong in making decisions to improve their competitive position.
To make the complexities of Sun Tzu’s strategic system easier to understand, The Warrior Class presents The Art of War as a series of lessons in competition, focussing on comparing positions. You can use this book to learn Sun Tzu’s competitive strategy several different ways. You can simply open it randomly, letting fate guide you to a lesson. If you want to address a specific problem, you can use the Lesson Topics on the previous pages to find the appropriate lesson. However, if you want a complete course in Sun Tzu’s strategy, you can read the book from beginning to end, building up from the simplest strategic ideas to the most complex.
Its first twenty-one lessons give you an overview of Sun Tzu’s strategic system. In this overview, our lessons present a few selected stanzas of The Art of War to illustrate its fundamental precepts. After the Introduction, the book goes through the stanzas of The Art of War one at a time, in the same order as they appear in the original text to preserve the way Sun Tzu logically develops his ideas through the course of his work. The book is NOT based upon incomplete and inaccurate English translations of Sun Tzu, but Gary Gagliardi's own award-winning translation, the only translation used worldwide as the basis of studying Sun Tzu.
The book starts each lesson with a simple multiple choice question about the proper competitive strategy for success. This question is designed to stimulate thought or discussion about the nature of competition, progress, and success. The book offers four possible answers for each question. These answers represent different schools of thought regarding the appropriate strategy. Following the question, we present a stanza from The Art of War, showing how Sun Tzu answered this particular question.
After the stanza, we explain its ideas in greater depth. Since many concepts do not translate exactly into English, we often refer to the original Chinese concepts, explaining them in more detail. These lessons sometimes go into greater detail about the various alternative answers to the initial question, explaining why Sun Tzu would not have agreed with these approaches. Other times, we relate the stanza to other parts of Sun Tzu’s system and text to provide a larger picture of his approach.
In the original printed books, each lesson was limited to one page for ease of study.
