From Sun Tzu to Steve Jobs: Seven Principles of Strategy That Never Go Out of Date
Two and a half thousand years separate Sun Tzu and Steve Jobs. Their core strategic principles are identical. Here are seven ideas about competition, positioning, and winning that have never stopped being true.
The best strategies have always been the same strategies.
Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War around 500 BC. He had never heard of a startup, a product roadmap, or a go-to-market plan. He was writing about armies and battles. But the principles he articulated — about knowing your enemy, choosing your terrain, concentrating your force, and winning without fighting — map to competitive business with an accuracy that should make you suspicious of how much has actually changed in human nature.
Know Yourself, Know Your Enemy
'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.' This is the most cited line from Sun Tzu and the most systematically ignored in business practice.
Most founders know their product. Most do not know their customer's alternatives — their real alternatives, including doing nothing — with the depth that genuine strategic insight requires. The failure to understand the competition is not a research failure. It is a humility failure. It requires admitting that your customers have choices that are genuinely good, and understanding exactly why they might choose them.
Choose Your Terrain
Sun Tzu's generals did not fight on terrain that disadvantaged them. They selected the battlefield. The modern equivalent is market selection — choosing to compete in a domain where your specific advantages are maximized and your competitors' advantages are minimized.
Jobs did not compete with IBM in the enterprise server market. He found terrain — consumer electronics, design-led products, the intersection of art and technology — where Apple's culture was an advantage and IBM's culture was a liability. The terrain selection was as important as anything Apple built.
Concentrate Force
'In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military strength.' Sun Tzu was describing what product strategy now calls focus.
Concentrated force on a single breakthrough beats diffused effort across many fronts every time. The startup that tries to win five market segments simultaneously wins none. The product team that ships twenty features in a quarter produces less impact than the team that ships three features that each matter enormously to a specific customer.
Win Without Fighting
'Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.' This is market positioning at its most sophisticated.
The company that becomes so clearly the right choice in its category that customers come to it rather than needing to be sold — that company has achieved what Sun Tzu called supreme excellence. The goal of strategy is not to win the competition. It is to make the competition irrelevant.
Know your terrain. Choose it deliberately.
Concentrate your force. Deploy it decisively.
Win without fighting — by being the obvious choice.
