What Can We Learn from Sun-Tm's art of War? China's Ancient Military Strategy vs. Modem Business Strategy*

In this paper, I attempted to address the problems inherent in modem business strategy by drawing insights from an unconventional source of strategy paradigm, the oldest and very highly revered book on military strategy, Sun-Ws Art of War. The issues I examined are universality of strategy, conflict resolution in a game-like situation, and "real problems " of strategy implementation. I made a systematic comparison of modem business strategy and Sun-Ws prindples, and identifled similarities and differences between the two in the areas of strategy formulation and implementation. From this comparative analysis, I derived a number of implications that are expected to contribute to overcoming the defldendes of modem business strategy, thereby laying the foundation for developing a concept of strategy that has universal validity. The concept of strategy was originally introduced in modern business rnanage-ment to provide firms with a rational means of coping with environmental changes. The pioneering works of Chandler (1962), Ansoff (1 965). Andrew (197 1