Victory Without Battle
by James Gimian and Barry Boyce
The Sun Tzu regards conflict as an inevitable part of being alive. Where there is life, there is conflict—whether you experience it simply as resistance or friction, or as an obstacle in the way of what you want to do, or as a pitched battle between armies. From the Sun Tzu perspective, avoiding conflict is futile. It will find us in the end.
The Sun Tzu also puts forth the message that leadership is inevitable. Leadership in our times has come to mean many things, and on any given day, hundreds of seminars are devoted to teaching leadership skills. The great leader who guides his people (organization, team, army, and so forth) through the battle and on to the promised land is a celebrated archetype. Leadership in the Sun Tzu, though, refers to something more fundamental that applies to any person in any station of life. Simply put, each one of us is the center of our own world, and whatever sphere we operate in, inevitably we will have an intention or a vision that motivates us to take action. There will be consequences to taking the lead, though. However benign and well intentioned our motives may seem, our actions are bound to encounter resistance at some point. When we begin to take a step forward, other people might not want to go along, and that will give rise to conflict. The conflict can take the form of inaction, ongoing resistance, or organized opposition. The course of action we contemplate may even create conflict within our own mind, before anyone else has even entered the picture.
For example, consider the story of Ted, a midlevel employee at an engineering firm. Ted’s firm had doubled in size in three years, and office space had been added quickly and haphazardly to keep up with the increasing size of the staff. Ted felt inspired to work up a proposal for a more rational design of the offices to solve problems that his coworkers were complaining about. However, word leaked out before he even had a chance to present his ideas, and he quickly found himself faced with a torrent of complaints, rumors about his motives, and alternative proposals. Ted was so discouraged by the response in the office that he put it aside for a time, and thought twice the next time he felt inspired to take the initiative to help. This is not an uncommon experience for those who try to accomplish something they care about.
Conflict is not always a bad thing. It often can be creative; it shakes up what needs to be shaken up. When in conference, creative teams like comedy and advertising copywriters will often disagree strongly and even harshly with one another, but that very friction can pry loose creative ideas that are hidden behind shyness and inhibition. Conflict—in the sense of the interplay between polarities— seems woven into the very fabric of life, and yet it so often can lead to wanton destruction. Nonetheless, whether we regard it as positive or negative, when a conflict emerges, it forces us to work with the friction, change, and chaos in our lives. We inevitably ask ourselves how we can work with these situations in a more creative and effective way. The answer within the Sun Tzu is that it is possible to come through the other side of conflict, having gained our objective, without blood on the floor. It is possible to achieve victory without battle.
This pivotal notion of achieving victory without battle is both one of the best-known and least understood premises in The Art of War. Most people assume achieving victory without waging war is just about a more clever or ruthless way of winning, about getting the upper hand, which is why the Sun Tzu shows up on Tony Soprano’s bookshelf. But this central principle is about much more than that; it’s about something the text calls “taking whole.”
From the perspective of the Sun Tzu, once you see the world as an interconnected whole, taking whole becomes the only option. Taking whole is essentially about including the perspectives of others in your victory. It’s not about “I win, you lose.” It’s not simply about bringing the other person over to your side but bringing him or her to something larger than either side, such as a solution that neither side envisioned at the outset of the conflict. In that way, there’s no residue from the conflict, and you can build something greater from that victory.
When leaders are unable to see the whole or lose sight of it, an apparent victory may mask simmering unrest that presages the resumption of conflict. When the victors of World War I drew lines in the sand to create the modern country of Iraq, they laid the groundwork for a series of conflicts that would play out over the course of a century. Conversely, an action taken by a leader that comes from the viewpoint of taking whole can be quite powerful. In recent times, a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada conferred on aboriginals special rights to harvest fish stocks, which put them into direct conflict with existing fishing communities. The ruling led to harsh rhetoric, vandalism, and violence in a number of fishing communities on the Atlantic seaboard. In one of these fishing villages, however, the chief of the local aboriginal band requested a gathering for all native and nonnative fishermen. At the meeting, he did not initiate negotiations. Instead, he simply asked each attendee to talk about his grandparents and tell his story. People began tentatively, but as more and more people from both sides told their family stories, it became clear that there was the beginning of common ground, the possibility of creating new relationships in the midst of conflict. It was apparent that people at the different poles of the conflict had valid aspirations that needed to be respected. The conflict did not vanish, but the intensity lessened and participants on both sides began to learn how to coexist in the new reality created by the court’s decision.
If taking whole becomes a way of working with the world, the text suggests, we can go beyond the habitual pattern of responding to conflict with aggression and one-sidedness, which only escalates the conflict and results in a cascading chain of events that leads to more destruction for everyone. Conflict is notorious for enticing us to see things in a partial and biased light. Because we see only parts of the picture, our ability to act or lead effectively is impaired. The Sun Tzu shows us the wisdom of not succumbing to this smaller vision.
But how do we go about doing that?
Through knowledge, the Sun Tzu tells us. At the heart of the ability to take whole is a deep kind of knowing that becomes habitual, a part of who we are. We know the details of a situation, we know the other we are encountering, and very important, we know ourselves.
And so in the military—
Knowing the other and knowing oneself,
In one hundred battles no danger.
Not knowing the other and knowing oneself,
One victory for one loss.
Not knowing the other and not knowing oneself,
In every battle certain defeat.
[chapter 3]
Knowing does not stop at collecting information. It involves employing all of our rational faculties as well as the intuitive grasp we have of a situation. This kind of full-bodied knowing enables us to arrive at an accurate appraisal of a situation, one that is not limited by a polarized point of view. Operating with a detailed and accurate picture of the events before us, we can act more effectively, which means acting in such a way that we include everyone’s perspective. That’s what taking whole means: acting on the basis of seeing things in their entirety, seeing from the perspective of the whole. To be able to take whole, then, an effective leader requires a more encompassing way of knowing.
Knowing, or cultivating knowledge, is not a onetime event, or even the culmination of a long process. It is a continual process, a mode of being. We can speak of it as a path, but this path has no final destination. Certainly there are destinations, but they become the starting point for further paths, so in the grand scheme of things, the destinations are merely way stations. This is not a mystical concept. If you learn to play a musical instrument, or to write or sing or play golf, when are you finished? At what moment do you say, “It’s all over now. I have nothing more to learn?”
The path of knowing, in terms of the text, does have a beginning. It begins when we appreciate the fact that as human beings, we are endowed with leadership—the impetus to take action in our world. It begins when we appreciate the inevitability of conflict that arises along with taking actions. It begins when we appreciate both the subtleties that lie at the heart of all conflicts and the need to “take whole” rather than grasp at partial victories. It begins when we realize what we don’t know, and we desire to know in new and different ways. The path of knowing helps us to learn something profound about ourselves and the world around us and why they don’t always get along—and what we can do about that.
(c) 2008 James Gimian. From The Rules of Victory by James Gimian and Barry Boyce. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications www.shambhala.com.
In bookstores March 25, 2008.
For over twenty-five years, James Gimian has taught seminars, corporate retreats, and leadership programs on how to effectively apply the strategies and principles of The Art of War in a wide range of contexts. Gimian is also the publisher of the Shambhala Sun magazine, and the codirector of the Denma Translation Group, which produced a critically acclaimed and best-selling translation of The Art of War.
Barry Boyce is a member of the Denma Translation Group and has taught seminars on The Art of War throughout North America and in Europe. He is a senior editor and staff writer for the Shambhala Sun magazine and also works as a freelance writer and writing teacher, through his company Victory Communication.
