Comparing: Empty and Full Ground

The Art of War 6:51:1-4

This article continues our project explaining each line of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.

Chapter Six of The Art of War is about “weakness” and “strength,” which Sun Tzu describes as “emptiness” and “fullness.” We use these two complementary opposites to make good decisions in Aiming, picking the best directions to move. The first two stanzas of the first Section of this chapter discuss empty and full battlegrounds.

“Emptiness” is as a “need” felt by those in whose minds we are trying to improve our positions. This empty ground of need is the source of all our opportunities. Everyone has weaknesses and strengths. In life, we exchange our strengths for the strengths of others. I exchange my strength of money for another person’s strength as a plumber. Every productive interaction is an exchange of strengths to fill our needs, that is, our emptiness. We can “fill” needs because they are empty.

The Right Ground

The first line of the first stanza here describes the ideal situation.

• (In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. A sentence from my English translation follows.)

<All> <first> <empty> <battle> <ground> <and> <yet> <wait> enemy> <is> <leisure>
Always arrive first to the empty battlefield to await the enemy at your leisure.

The initial focus of this chapter is on the “battle ground,” a place where we and our organizations are compared to others. We improve our strategic positions, not by trying to take positions away from others, but by moving to empty areas, usually unsatisfied needs, and addressing them.

Opportunities are openings into which we can move. They are potential positions where nothing currently exists. They are invisible because the most common form of empty ground is unfulfilled needs. There is an empty position in their minds to fill that any need. Because the need is felt inside them, it is invisible. We must hear it in what they say. This is the strategic skill of Listening.

What fills our needs must exist on ground outside of us. This ground can be either known or unexplored. When ground is known, "empty" areas remain empty because solutions for filling the needs are difficult, costly, or risky to provide. We move to satisfy such needs because we think we have discovered an innovative way to address them.  When these empty areas are new needs, they have recently been created by change. Today, that change is most often technological. Because needs are invisible, most of us do not even initially recognize these areas as potential competitive battlegrounds.

There is a strong parallel here between arriving first in a new competitive arena and creating strategic Momentum, the topic of the previous chapter. Creating Momentum depends upon a surprise, which is an unexpected move. Moving to apparently worthless ground is unexpected. By simply doing this, we are developing momentum that makes us difficult to oppose.

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