Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, including Sun. Tzu's The Art of War. - book review

Organization Studies, Nov-Dec, 2002

This book aims at a managerial audience, but it holds implications for research as well. On reading this book, one starts to wonder why there is so little academic research into the tactics firms employ. In many ways, McNeilly's book deals with tactics and ploys rather than with strategy. Tactics are an important part of business life, but academic research has not given them the attention they deserve. Also, the book implicitly points out that academic research in management may have become overspecialized. Theoretically, McNeilly draws on industrial organization, core competence thinking, game theory and evolutionary economics. He does not refer to these theories, but they do underpin his prescriptions. The result of this multi-theoretical approach is a realism that offers new insights, like the emphasis on the use of tactics. A promising avenue for academic research may therefore he to look into the interstices of theoretical fields and find new understanding about strategy and organization there.

Despite the criticism, this book is worth reading. Not only because it is entertaining, but also because it does challenge one to think about taken-for-granted routines. It would have benefited, however, from an exploration of the limits of applying a classic to modern business.

References

Brown, Shona, and K. Eisenhardt

1998 Competing on the edge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

D'Aveni, Richard

1994 Hypercompetion. New York: Free Press.

Jacobson, Robert

1992 'The "Austrian" school of strategy'. Academy of Management Review 17/4: 782-807.

Porter, Michael E.

1996 'What is strategy?'. Harvard Business Review (Nov./Dec.): 61--78.