“Ponder and deliberate before you make a move.”

It's a book of conflict knowledge and tactics revolving around several key concepts, including:<ul><li>Knowing when to fight and when not to fight.</li><li>Knowing how to mislead the enemy.</li><li>Knowing oneself and one's enemy.</li></ul>

Summary

If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected .”

<ul><li>Strike a balance between confusing the enemy and teaching troops to obey seemingly futile commands.</li><li>Arrive on the battlefield early and organized.</li><li>Actions should be clear and coordinated.</li></ul>

Maneuvering

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

<ul><li>The Moral Law- causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger</li><li>Heaven- signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.</li><li>Earth- comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death.</li><li>The Commander-  stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.</li><li>Method and discipline</li></ul>

5 Essential Elements of War

<ul><li>Physical terrain and psychological terrain are equally important.</li><li>Poor leadership cannot make up for well-trained troops; well-trained troops cannot make up for poor leadership.</li></ul>

Terrain

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

<ul><li>The leader has full awareness of themself, troops, and the opposition.</li><li>The leader knows how to use small or large forces.</li><li>The leader knows how to unify the ranks with a common purpose.</li><li>The leader knows how to be patient while the opposition is impatient.</li><li>The leader's authority does not cloud judgment.</li></ul>

5 Essentials for Victory:

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

<ul><li>Recklessness, which leads to destruction;</li><li>cowardice, which leads to capture;</li><li>a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults;</li><li>a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame;</li><li>over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.</li></ul>

5 Dangerous Faults which may Affect a General:

“Deep knowledge is to be aware of disturbance before disturbance, to be aware of danger before danger, to be aware of destruction before destruction, to be aware of calamity before calamity. Strong action is training the body without being burdened by the body, exercising the mind without being used by the mind, working in the world without being affected by the world, carrying out tasks without being obstructed by tasks.”

The Art of War is not really about war per se but about how to be wise when it comes to our  daily life battles.

The Art of War is an enduring classic that holds a special place in the culture and history of East Asia. An ancient Chinese text on the philosophy and politics of warfare and military strategy, the treatise was written in 6th century B.C. by a warrior-philosopher now famous all over the world as Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu's teachings remain as relevant to leaders and strategists today as they were to rulers and military generals in ancient times. Divided into thirteen chapters and written succinctly, The Art of War is a must-read for anybody who works in a competitive environment.

Book BucketList 2022

The Art of War

You need to convince your managers, coworkers, and clients to answer “Yes!” to three questions:1) Can you do the job well? (Are you competent?)2) Are you excited to be here? (Are you committed?)3) Do you get along with us? (Are you compatible?)Mastering the Three Cs requires balance: it’s important that you show enough of each quality without showing too much.

The 3 Cs Of Career Success

Proving competence means doing your job fully, accurately, and promptly without needing to be micromanaged. If you undershoot, others may perceive you as clueless. But there’s danger in overshooting, too. (Overbearing)Another major challenge to proving competence is that true competence can be difficult to measure.In these cases, perceived competence for instance, how confidently you speak in meetings can matter just as much as true competence.If you can hit that sweet spot however (and not overshoot or undershoot!), people will want to offer you more important responsibilities.

Competence

Commitment, means you are fully present and excited to help the team meet its goals. Prove your commitment, and people will want to invest in you.The challenge of showing commitment is, again, avoiding the extremes: appearing either apathetic or overly-eager.

Commitment

If you can demonstrate compatibility, people will want to work with you.Proving compatibility is more than being dependable and polite.To make people eager to be around you, you have to make them comfortable and get along with them in an authentic and natural way.The major challenge with this compatibility is that it depends on whom you’re with and what expectations and implicit biases they may hold.Remember: People tend to like, hire, and give opportunities to those who look like, talk like, and have similar interests and backgrounds as they do.

Compatibility

What will separate you from the rest early in your career? The ability to take ownership, manage expectations, navigate people dynamics, and communicate professionally—skills that school doesn't teach. Most career guides assume that you already know how the working world works. But if you're starting your very first job or taking a job in a new company, you might not know all the unspoken rules that determine who gets ahead and who doesn't. In The Unspoken Rules, you'll learn the basic workplace skills necessary for success. From the author: "Why didn't anyone ever tell me this?! I've lost count of the number of times I've asked myself this question. As the son of a single mother who dropped out of school at the age of twelve to work in a sewing-machine factory, I missed the lesson on the unspoken rules of the professional workplace. Instead, I learned my lesson the hard way—through trial and error. Now I'm on a mission to discover and decode the unspoken rules of work and share them with others. Over the last four years, I've interviewed over five hundred interns, early career professionals, managers, and executives, from HR to finance, law firms to tech companies, across the globe. My conversations revolved around three key topics: What are the most common mistakes early-career professionals make at work? What would you do differently if you could relive your first years on the job? What do you think separates top performers from mediocre ones? After testing the advice I gathered from these hundreds of interviews, I started coaching other early-career professionals. Now I'm distilling everything I've learned into a step-by-step guide called The Unspoken Rules. We all have what it takes to be a top performer. It begins with mastering the unspoken rules."

The Unspoken Rules

Competitive advantage fades away faster than any time in recent memory. In the 1980s, if you had a performance edge over your competitors, you could reasonably expect to continue being a leader for around 10 years, on average. But now the half-life of that advantage has shrunk to just one year. That means that short-lived success is actually still very common, but sustained success becomes very hard and very rare. That means that, actually, reimagination is the new execution. In order to stay on top, or even just to tread water and stay still, you need to constantly reimagine your business.

Reimagination Is The New Execution

But reimagination is not so simple if you already have a highly successful business model. We become prisoners of the mental models that underpin our past success. In fact, Martin Reeves found in dealing with businesses that you can’t really stretch your strategy unless you stretch your mind.Now play is of course a great way of stretching your mind. Reeves is not suggesting literally that executives huddle around a conference table with a big pile of Lego bricks, for example; instead he’s created a series of imagination games to help executives to stretch their thinking.

Business Play - The Imagination Games

Let’s suppose that you’re stuck in the rut of seeing the world through the lens of your past and current success. Reeves would recommend the “Anti-Company Game,” and here’s how it works. You get a piece of paper, you create a list of everything which is essential to your strategy - everything which underpinned your past success, everything which is core and sacred - and then you flip it. You create the exact mirror-image list of assumptions, and then you make the best business case for this antiself. You’ll be surprised at the ideas that it triggers.

Game 1: The “Anti-Company Game”

You’re the CEO of a hotel chain. Inconveniently, you don’t actually own any hotels or any rooms or even operate any hotels or any rooms anywhere. Ridiculous - quite possibly - but actually, how would you know the difference between ridiculous and the merely unfamiliar, untried and uncomfortable? Actually, had the executives of hotels played the “Anti-Company Game” before 2007, they might have been able to foresee the appearance of Airbnb, the hotel-less hospitality company, and they might have been able to stave off disruption by preemptively disrupting themselves.

The “Anti-Company Game” Example

On the edge of your industries - on the edge of every industry - are a population of maverick companies that are taking a bet against the incumbents’ business model and their view of the future. Actually, they have no choice because to be a miniature version of the incumbent would not be viable. Now, it’s easy not to notice them - many of them are small companies. It's easy to deliberately overlook them with some justification. Many startups disappear fairly quickly after being founded. And it’s very, very tempting, given all of your experience in the business, to judge them.

Game 2: The “Maverick Game”

“Do these mavericks know what they’re doing? Does their business model make sense? Will they ever make any money?”But instead of judging them from the comfort and the confidence of your position, try assuming that it’s they that have the right bet on the future. Think about the consequences of that for your business model. Try making the best case for their idea.

… Or, The “Switch Game”

You are the CEO of a company that makes equipment that makes semiconductors. Naturally, you’d probably spend most of your time and attention on your main customer industry, the electronics industry. And if it so happened, that a couple of maverick bioscience companies were tinkering with your patents and your technologies, you might overlook that as a distraction, an irrelevance.

The “Maverick Game” Example

But actually, Brooks Automation, a leader in the field, decided to take a close-up look at such a group of mavericks to see whether it could learn anything. And it realized that, actually, the same techniques and technologies which can be used to handle delicate semiconductors can also be applied to other fragile and easily contaminated materials, like biological samples. And puzzling on the significance of this, they reimagined how to handle and store and transport and label and identify biological samples. In fact, they became a successful pioneer in the new industry of automated biobanking.

Now, not everything in business goes according to plan. In fact, sometimes the plans go horribly awry. But you know what? That can be a source of inspiration, too. Enter the “Pre-Mortem Game”: your role in this game is to write the obituary for your company, which is going to fail with 100% certainty in 5 years’ time. What is the cause of death? What will have been the point of failure? Why will it have failed? How will it have failed?

Game 3: The “Pre-Mortem Game”

The challenge in the “Pre-Mortem Game” is that it’s easy to be seduced into the baseline fallacy. The baseline fallacy is the idea that it’s the current business model which is the low-risk bet. And of course that tends to be true until it isn’t true, at which point it’s probably too late to do anything about it.

The Trap: The Baseline Fallacy

Your employees are an early-warning indicator. They will have intuitions if the model begins to slip, but it’s very hard for them to speak up. And it’s even taboo for them to speak up when the business model is under pressure. But when executives create playgrounds - spaces for the safe exploration of alternatives and alternative scenarios - then you get to tap into your employees’ considerable experience about the vulnerabilities and the weak spots and the blind spots of your company.

The Way Out: Your Employees

It’s probably been quite a while since we last visited the local banking branch, right? Had bricks-and-mortar banks played the “Pre-Mortem Game,” perhaps they would have heard their employees expressing some concerns about the gradually dwindling flow of customers to local branches. And perhaps they would have been slightly less taken by surprise when companies like NewBank, a digital native, seized, very rapidly indeed, on that opportunity to convince, to date, more than 40 million Latin Americans that in-person transactions in real buildings were a quaint but obsolete relic of the past.

The “Pre-Mortem Game” Example

It’s only when you bring your vulnerabilities into full view in this way that you may be motivated to reimagine your business and to do so in a robust manner. It’s why the Roman Catholic Church invented the role, the position of the Devil’s advocate in the 16th century to test the future consequences of its decisions to appoint new saints. They did that by imagining what would Satan say or propose or counterpropose, in addition to the normal procedure of thinking about the big man upstairs.

Beatification, Canonization And The Devil’s Advocate In Business

Any human being, any employee, any team and therefore any company can harness human imagination. It’s a defining trait of our species. Failures to imagine in business are really failures of leadership. Business is a serious matter, but it should not exclude play. When leaders embrace play and imagination games, they can unlock the imagination of their employees, uncover disruptive new strategies and renew their lease on the future.

An Infinite Game Shouldn’t Be Played Like A Finite One

Successful business strategy is about actively shaping the game you play, not just playing the game you find.

The essence of strategy lies in creating tomorrow’s competitive advantages faster than competitors mimic the ones you possess today.

Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

Strategies for taking the hill won’t necessarily hold it.

Play is spontaneous and pleasurable but, more importantly, it accelerates and derisks learning. When we’re kids, it helps us to try out new behaviors, to refine those behaviors and to imagine what is not but what could be or what will be. Martin Reeves, a business strategist dealing with adults, argues that, in fact, play in business is not just possible: it’s essential and even urgent. Here’s why.

To thrive in today's competitive economy, you need to constantly reimagine your business. So what's the secret to sustained success? Strategist Martin Reeves makes a pitch for embracing play to spark innovative business ideas -- and invites you to try out a series of imagination games that he uses to get leaders to stretch their thinking and dream up new possibilities.

The Business Games: Why Play is Essential for Business

A business needs to build a personal brand. It is misunderstood that brand design means a logo. Everybody has a logo. There are 10 zillion logos in the world. So if you design a great logo, that's not a brand. There are a few brand touch points like your website and email or print, broadcast e-commerce, social media, video, and digital marketing that show off your brand.

Brand Touchpoints to make you a Brand

If you want to make sure that your brand shows up in a consistent way across all of these points, then I have these nine elements of a brand design ecosystem.

First of all, we need to have a logo. It should probably have very few clours. Do not have more than three colours.

Logo

A font is a brand identity like a logo. Have a font or two. Fonts also have a personality, like Serif Fonts, Son Serif Fonts, or handwritten fonts. Fonts say a lot about your brand, so choose ones that are consistent.

Fonts

Colour has incredible psychological power. Colours mean things. The colour palette should have 3–4 or 5 colours so that you can talk about the strategy of what you do and what it is that you offer. Colours speak to consumers. Select colour not based on what is your favourite but on what consumers like and to which they respond.

Colour Palette

Companies like Louis Vitton follow a pattern on all their bags. Meanwhile, Apple has a brushed metal finish on its products.

Pattern and Texture

There are millions of styles of photography and you need to choose the one that suits your brand which needs to be maintained consistently.

Photography & Animation

Like photography, there are millions of illustrations. Select the right one that syncs with your logo and colour palette consistently to establish a visual vocabulary for your brand that is recognisable.

Illustration & Iconography

Many companies fail to identify sound as part of the brand. "Intel is one such company that has made its signature sound," Bum, Bum, Bum, that when one hears it immediately recalls the brand, "Intel Inside."

Sound

A particular layout or style needs to be maintained consistently across all your brand touchpoints.

 Layout

The Tone of Voice: What does your brand sound like, formal, joky, informal, serious, funny, etc. The copy of your website or tweet or your writing.

The Tone of Voice

There are many products in your industry. Do you want to remain one or you want to be the BRAND?

Vikas Nagori | There are many products out in your industrey, only few make it becoming a Brand. Join the journey of becoming a Brand

Buidling your Branding | LinkedIn

I've been fascinated by the Patterns of Strategy book, as it has offered me a new way to look at business strategy, personal strategy and any kind of strategy for that matter.I've curated here the 80 strategy patterns shared in the book. I recommend reading the book for details about each one.Headsup - each strategy pattern is described in this list by:# Name of strategy - Category - Dimensions of strategy at play (Fit/Time/Power) - Difficulty level to implement (High/Med/Low) #strategy

80 Patterns of Strategy

Create coupling between organizations, so that all can gain more market share than alone.Collaborative strategy. Fit & Time. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 1/80: Alliance

Refresh coupling to market by adding new features to hold market share.Market strategy. Time. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 2/80: Augmentation

Influence trajectory of sector through coupling based on deep expertise.Herd strategy. Fit & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 3/80: Authority

Exploit coupling of larger player to their market by filling gaps in their value proposition.Small player strategy. Time. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 4/80: Autolycus

Create couplings with actors with different problems in different sectors to demonstrate your value.Growth strategy. Fit, Time & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 5/80: Bowling Alley

6/80: Brand Reputation. Strengthen coupling through brand reputation aligned to customers' values to maintain share.Defensive strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 6/80: Brand Reputation

7/80: Broadcast. Test many products in the marketplace to find the big hitters where you can build a strong coupling. Growth strategy. Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 7/80: Broadcast

8/80: BubbleCreate intense energy in coupling from product to market, drive rapid price escalation, then exit.Market strategy. Fit & Time. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 8/80: Bubble

9/80: Camouflage. Reduce your apparent strength in your coupling to the market in order to avoid competitor attention.Cunning plans strategy. Fit & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 9/80: Camouflage

Build couplings with others in order to create a powerful combined market coupling.Collaborative strategy. Fit & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 10/80: Cartel

11/80: Change the Game. Change the market by at least a disruptive change in the coupling. Defensive strategy. Fit & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 11/80: Change the Game

Build couplings to nearby and complementary organizations to drive innovation.Collaborative strategy. Fit. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 12/80: Cluster

Focus on the essential value proposition in coupling to market to maintain position.Defensive strategy. Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 13/80: Core

14/80: Crusader. Supplant the coupling between herd and market with a new value type for higher purpose.Market strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 14/80: Crusader

Create coupling direct to market by removing intermediary and reducing costs.Market strategy. Fit & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 15/80: Disintermediation

Eliminate part of the coupling to the market to reduce costs.Defensive strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 16/80: Divestment

Create new couplings in new markets or with new products to smooth revenues and reduce risk.Growth strategy. Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 17/80: Diversification

Reduce strength in coupling to reduce costs.Defensive strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 18/80: Downsizing

19/80: Dragonfly. Maintain coupling to market through heritage or traditional offering.Defensive strategy. Fit & Time. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 19/80: Dragonfly

Attract customers to a service by a short-term commitment to a coupling.Defensive strategy. Fit & Time. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 20/80: Easy Entry

Build dominance and evolve coupling to market through sustained innovation.Suppliers strategy. Fit, Time & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 21/80: Expert

22/80: Falcon. Use stored energy to attack and exploit the other's coupling to the market to capture market share. Competitive strategy. Time & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 22/80: Falcon

Rapidly build coupling in market to exploit efforts of the first to market.Competitive strategy. Time & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 23/80: Fast Follower

Only pretend to change coupling in order to avoid difficult challenges.Cunning plans strategy. Fit. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 24/80: Feint

Be first to create coupling in market to capture market share.Small player strategy. Fit & Time. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 25/80: First Mover

26/80: Frigate Bird. Increase your apparent strength to create new coupling opportunities.Small player strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 26/80: Frigate Bird

Directly attack competitor through coupling to shared market for advantage.Competitive strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 27/80: Frontal Attack

Enable coupling between others to create market.Collaborative strategy. Fit & Time. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 28/80: Go-Between

Overwhelm others by the massive dominance of your coupling.Defensive strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 29/80: Gorilla

Destabilize competitor by constantly reconfiguring coupling.Cunning plans strategy. Fit, Time & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 30/80: Guerrilla

Break or transform couplings to reinvent yourself and reach different markets.Cunning plans strategy. Fit. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 31/80: Harlequin

Integrate units coupled at a single point of the value chain to reduce costs.Defensive strategy. Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 32/80: Horizontal Integration

Create highly differentiated coupling to the market.Small player strategy. Fit. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 33/80: Independent

Create intermediary coupling between supplier and market in order to add value to customers.Market strategy. Fit & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 34/80: Intermediation

In chaotic times, be first to define and create stability and key couplings.Herd strategy. Fit, Time & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 35/80: Islands of Sanity

36/80: Jeeves. As supplier, covertly and benignly influence the coupling in your area of expertise.Supplier strategy. Fit & Time. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 36/80: Jeeves

Create highly leveraged value to a coupling through specialist expertise.Collaborative strategy. Fit, Time & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 37/80: Jigsaw

Match your product range to that of the herd or competitor you are coupled to.Defensive strategy. Fit. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 38/80: Keeping up with the Joneses

Create formally inter-coupled set of companies for power and defense.Collaborative strategy. Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 39/80: Keiretsu

Concentrate power on coupling with segment, then adjoining segments to take market.Competitive strategy. Fit, Time & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 40/80: Knight's Move

Set herd trajectory through changes in your coupling to the market.Herd strategy. Fit & Time. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 41/80: Leader

Strengthen couplings within the herd to maintain its cohesion.Herd strategy. Fit. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 42/80: Linus

Hold customers in coupling by making it hard or unappealing to switch.Defensive strategy. Time & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 43/80: Lock In

Destabilize others' couplings and exploit the chaos that follows.Cunning plans strategy. Fit & Time. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 44/80: Loki

Maintain and milk coupling in a declining market.Defensive strategy. Time & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 45/80: Long Tail

Restructure market through your products and couplings to your advantage.Market strategy. Fit, Time & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 46/80: Marketect

Create a new market and couple to it.Market strategy. Fit, Time & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 47/80: Market Maker

Create two couplings to present two brands for the same offering to the market.Cunning plans strategy. Fit & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 48/80: Masquerade

Merge organizations to reduce the cost of servicing the coupling.Defensive strategy. Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 49/80: M&A for Economies of Scale

Merge organizations to create new couplings or value propositions.Growth strategy. Fit & Power. High difficulty

Strategy Pattern 50/80: M&A for Synergy

Stay small to keep market coupling below competitor's radar.Small player strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 51/80: Mouse

Herd coalesce to mitigate attack on coupling to market.Defensive strategy. Fit, Time & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 52/80: Musk Ox

Concentrate on coupling to targeted slice of the market for localized advantage.Market strategy. Fit & Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 53/80: Niche

Gradually build couplings to adjacent markets through reinvestment of profit for growth.Growth strategy. Power. Low difficulty

Strategy Pattern 54/80: Organic Growth

Build a coupling to a third party delivering capabilities that allow them to focus on their strengths.Supplier strategy. Fit, Time & Power. Medium difficulty

Strategy Pattern 55/80: Outsource

First share: 80 patterns of strategy, from my favorite #strategy book 💡 Enjoy!

Patterns of Strategy shows how the strategic fit between organisations drives strategic direction. It is essential reading for those who wish to understand how to manoeuvre their organisation to change its strategic fit to their advantage. The 80 ‘patterns’ of strategy help you explore options for collaboration and competition within your strategic ecosystem. A practical and authoritative guide, you can use it to plan and navigate your strategic future.

The Art of War

The Unspoken Rules

The Business Games: Why Play is Essential for Business

Buidling your Branding | LinkedIn

Patterns of Strategy

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