Comparing: Train New People
The Art of War 9:7.1-9: With new, undedicated soldiers, you can depend on them if you discipline them.
This post continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English translation and Chinese transliterations are from my award-winning book, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed.
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This article discusses the beginning of Section Seven of Chapter 9 of The Art of War. This chapter is entitled Armed March. Its general topic is making competitive moves that advance our positions. These nine lines discuss the integration of new people into an organization, comparing different types of people and how we need to manage them.
In the lines below, we summarize each Chinese character with a single English word shown in < > brackets in their original order. This transliteration of the Chinese is followed by an English sentence translation.
The Untrained
Competition is a comparison. We must constantly compare all of our alternatives in order to make good decisions about how to grow. These alternatives are in competition with each other. This competition includes our decisions about utilizing new people.
<Soldier> <not> <yet> <intimate> <depend> <on> <and> <yet> <penalize> <it>
With new, undedicated soldiers, you can depend on them if you discipline them.<Then> <no> <obey>
They will tend to disobey your orders.<No> <obey> <then> <difficult> <use>
If they do not obey your orders, they will be useless.
Many of the people we bring into our organizations are untrained. The first thing we must decide is how we train them so that we can depend upon them. We can try to use the threat of dismissal to control them, but the problem is that they do not know how to behave within an organization with a mission. This makes the punishment irrelevant.
In our software company, we stopped hiring people directly out of college because they didn’t know how to act in a work environment. They thought that a job for pay was like their “work” in college. I may be exaggerating to say that they expected to get summers off, but not by much. We would hire people who had worked their way through college or worked after college, but our preferred employee was the college drop out. They were capable enough to get into college, but also smart enough to see that it cost a lot more than it was worth.
Our experience in popular education institutions is learning to do what we are told. Much of our current education system was designed around the thinking of people like J.D. Rockefeller who thought schools should be designed to train factory workers. He said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” But his sense of a job was a factory role that was extremely well-defined. Those who work on assembly lines or at McDonald’s may have every action spelled out for them, but most forms of work require individual decision-making.
Jobs that require few decisions are good places to start new people. From such jobs, we, as new workers, can learn the organization’s mission, and, as employers, see how well someone can follow directions. However, following directions depends on two people: the person giving direction and the person getting it. If tasks are not clear, not even the best potential worker can learn it successfully except by trial and error.
The Trained
<Soldier> <finished> <intimate> <depend> <on>
You can depend on seasoned, dedicated soldiers.<And> <yet> <penalize> <no> <act>
But you must avoid disciplining them without reason.<Then> <no> <can> <use>
Otherwise, you cannot use them.
Decision-making is a choice of alternatives. We train people initially by giving them jobs with few alternatives. Over time, we get more experience in our work. As our responsibilities grow, we learn more about what others expect. Over time, we expand our responsibilities with choices from among more alternatives. In choosing among more alternatives, we must make more comparisons.
Most jobs differ from school or factory work because we don’t have just one boss. For most work, our real boss is the customers using our work. Customers are all the same in many respects, but many are also unique in some respects. Punishing new for not following directions is one thing. The correct action should have been clear. However, punishing people for making decisions especially when there is a large number of alternatives is more difficult. If we knew the outcomes beforehand, making decisions would be easy. The problem is that we do not and often cannot know the results of taking a certain path before we take it. Criticizing a decision once we know its outcome afterward is usually unfair. As we say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. The only decisions that we can punish decision makers for are those whose flaws should have been beforehand, for example, problems that others warned us about.
One of the problems we had in our software business was that none of our smartest people, who were all top programmers, wanted management positions. They were happy taking responsibility for their own work, but taking responsibility for others was a different type of challenge, one for which we cannot be trained.
Society
This next stanza is the key regarding the integration of new people into an organization.
<Make> <commands> <it> <by> <means> <of> <culture>
You must control your soldiers with esprit de corps.<Together> <it> <by> <means> <of> <conquest>
You must bring them together by winning victories.<Correct> <meaning> <must> <obtain>
You must get them to believe in you.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream of culture. Sun Tzu cast his net more broadly. He said that work habits of all kinds were downstream of culture. This applies particularly to the willingness to fight using good strategy, both militarily and in our everyday lives.
As with all things, success breeds more success and, eventually, a culture of success. The same is true of failure. We can use our creativity either to invent new paths forward or to excuse our failures. For many employers, the appeal of illegal aliens was not low wages, but their willingness to work hard. This is another area in which poor education systems can do much unrecognized damage.
Seeing the results of action over time is not easy. Results are visible only by watching the course of people’s lives over the years and by studying history that we can see the connection between culture, behavior, and success on both the individual and social level. However, a tendency of modern historians to attribute the success of nations to geographical features, which we cannot control, rather than cultures, which our choices shape. The same is true for individual, attributing success or failure to outside forces. Over time, however, we can to see what works in the world.