Why Everyone Quotes Sun Tzu — and Why They Shouldn't

Written by Will Whawell. Human intelligence throughout; AI assisted with the drafting.

Open any business book, LinkedIn post or conference keynote and the odds are high you'll meet Sun Tzu within the first few pages. "Know yourself and know your enemy." "All warfare is based on deception." "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." The quotes are short, portable, and carry an aura of ancient wisdom that makes the speaker sound strategic without having to do any actual strategic work.

That is precisely the problem.

Sun Tzu has become the default intellectual garnish of business writing. He is quoted more than he is read, and read more than he is understood. The Art of War is a short collection of aphorisms written for the commanders of Warring States China. It is not a theory of competition, not a model of decision-making under uncertainty, and not a guide to markets that are only partially zero-sum. Treating it as such is cargo-cult strategy: we repeat the phrases because they sound profound, not because they help us think better.

The overuse problem

Three things explain the persistence of the Sun Tzu reflex.

First, the text is conveniently vague. Almost any course of action can be retrofitted to one of its maxims after the fact. Success becomes "knowing the terrain"; failure becomes "failing to know the enemy". That makes it an excellent post-hoc rationalisation device and a terrible planning tool.

Second, it flatters the reader. Quoting a 2,500-year-old general signals that you operate at a higher plane of strategy than people who merely talk about unit economics or realisation rates. The mystique does the work that argument should do.

Third, modern professional life is not war. Markets contain repeated games, mutual gains from trade, reputation effects, regulation and people who can leave. Sun Tzu's world is closer to a single-shot annihilation contest, and deception that works on a battlefield destroys trust in a supply chain, a talent market — or a courtroom. The translation costs are high and usually ignored.

None of this means The Art of War is worthless. Some of its observations about preparation, intelligence and avoiding strength are durable. But durability is not sufficiency, and sufficiency is what business writing keeps claiming for it.

The four sources that earn their keep

Clausewitz is harder to quote and much harder to ignore once understood. On War gives us two concepts that map directly onto organisational life. Friction — "everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult" — is the cumulative drag of small, unanticipated failures that separates the plan on paper from the campaign in the field. The fog of war is the permanent uncertainty under which decisions must be made anyway. Fog makes it hard to know what to do; friction makes it hard to do what you've decided. Clausewitz also insists that war is the continuation of policy — strategy is never separate from objectives, only an instrument of them. Most strategy decks would improve simply by asking his questions: where will friction accumulate, how much of this picture is still fog, and what constraints actually bound this "war"?

Moltke the Elder supplies the corrective to planning theatre. No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength — usually shortened to "no plan survives contact". The point is not that planning is useless; it is that the value of planning lies in the shared understanding and the capacity to adapt, not in the document. Organisations that treat the strategy deck as scripture rather than as a temporary hypothesis are still fighting the last war.

John Boyd moves the focus from static plans to the tempo of decision cycles. His OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — is often reduced to a cartoon about speed. Boyd's deeper claim is that advantage comes from the quality of orientation: the mental models that shape what an organisation even notices. The side that re-orients faster than its rival gains a compounding advantage.

Game theory supplies the formal language the aphorisms lack: players, strategies, payoffs, information asymmetry, credible commitment, equilibrium. Zero-sum assumptions become testable rather than default. The tools are harder to master than a memorable quote — which is exactly why they appear less often in popular business writing, and exactly why they are worth the effort.

Where the slogans meet a real matter

Take a funded, ATE-backed consumer claim against a UK financial institution, of the sort many firms ran in the PCP wave. The claimant has after-the-event cover for adverse costs; a commercial funder pays own-side costs for a share of proceeds; the defendant faces damages, management distraction, and read-across risk to a portfolio of similar claims.

Frame that with the business-book Sun Tzu lines and you get nothing you can act on. "Know your enemy" does not tell you how to value an ATE-protected risk profile or a funder's return threshold. "Deception" is a poor guide in a regulated environment constrained by duties to the court and disclosure obligations. "Winning without fighting" gestures at early settlement but offers no help pricing it, structuring offers or sequencing Part 36 moves. You still have to decide what to offer, when, and how to react as evidence and costs move. Sun Tzu leaves those as narrative choices.

The stronger sources do not. Clausewitz predicts the shape of the matter: disclosure turns up documents nobody expected at intake, a key witness underperforms, the court makes an unexpected interim costs order — and each event moves the payoff landscape away from the neat percentages in the original funding model. Moltke tells you what to do about it: treat the costs budget and case theory as first-contact plans, build formal review points after disclosure and major applications, and revise rather than defend when contact breaks the model. Boyd tells you where the advantage lies: the side that integrates legal analysis, funding dynamics and ATE position fastest sees first when the other side is still working from an outdated picture — and can table offers calibrated to that mismatch. And game theory tells you where it all lands: the "right" settlement is not the midpoint between positions but the point where neither side can improve its risk-adjusted outcome by deviating — an equilibrium that ATE cover, funding terms and portfolio signalling each shift, sometimes sharply.

The practical test

A simple filter for any strategic idea: can it change a pricing decision? Can it alter a litigation budget in a defensible way? Can it explain or predict settlement behaviour? If the answer is no, it is probably rhetoric.

Sun Tzu rarely passes that test on its own. Clausewitz, Moltke, Boyd and game theory routinely do. So the next time a situation involves uncertainty, incomplete information and adaptive opponents, skip the intellectual seasoning and reach instead for friction and fog, for plans held as hypotheses, for the speed and quality of orientation, and for the actual structure of the game being played.

The quotes will be less Instagrammable. The thinking will be better.

Sun Tzu can still sit alongside these frameworks — as illustration, not foundation.