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.
Due to our member’s generous support, we will send all our articles to all subscribers. To enjoy my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This article discusses the end 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. The first part of this section compared trained people to untrained ones. These two stanzas compare difficult training with easy training.
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.
Easy Training
Competition is a comparison. We must constantly compare all of our alternatives in order to make good decisions about how to advance our positions. Our alternative choices are in competition with each other. This comparison includes our decisions about how we train new people when we are growing and need more manpower.
<Command> <simple> <march> <by> <means> <of><teaching> <these> <people>
Make it easy for people to know what to do by training your people.<Then> <people> <obey>
Your people will then obey you.
We have a choice. Do we make the training we offer as easy as possible or as challenging as possible? We all have to perform a variety of tasks in every job. Do we start by learning the most difficult tasks or the easiest?
Notice that Sun Tzu describes training as a <march>. This is because the only real training comes from practicing something. In his army, this means new men started training by marching. They all already knew how to walk. Marching means walking together following commands. The easiest way for people to learn is not by reading a book or sitting in classes. It is to learn by doing.
We may be tempted to train new people to do the tasks that are the most important or the tasks where we need the most help. But it is wiser to train people to do the easiest tasks, and promote trained people to learn more difficult tasks over time. Becoming integrated into an organization starts with making a contribution to the organization as quickly as possible, no matter how small that contribution is. When we become productive, we are much less likely to leave because we feel needed.
This is the psychology of positioning. Positions within an organization are like steps on a ladder. When we first start, getting on the ladder initially is what matters. This gives us a position. Once we have a position, we want to defend it. Work is more rewarding when something is required from us. After we achieve that first step, we will accept more and more responsibility because we want to move forward, that is, advance our positions.
In our software company, we gave up on hiring people with experience in programming because the development methods we used were largely unique within our organization. Instead, we brought all programmers into our company as “trainees” performing basic tasks. People mastered the technology at different speeds. We wanted the people who learned the fastest. But how fast people moved up the ladder depended initially on getting their feet on the first rung.
Difficult Training
<Command> <no> <simple> <march> <by> <means> <of> <teaching> <these> <people>
If you do not make it easy for people to know what to do, you won’t train your people.<Then> <people> <no> <obey>
Then they will not obey.
There is a temptation to bring people into organizations at a higher level because they have experience. This is especially true for management jobs. However, having managers train at high-levels of decision-making on the job can lead to expensive mistakes. In fast-growing businesses. where outside investors are involved, there is always pressure to bring in “experienced” management from other companies, rather than take the time to grow those skilled resources internally. This results in a number of problems.
These people often lack integration into their new organizations. Every organization is different from all others. The organizations that are the most similar are often competitors to each other. How does someone who has had the perspective of the opposition, adapt to an opposing frame of mind?
Psychologically, they think in the patterns they developed in their old jobs. They will be tempted to change methods so that people in their new organization work more like the ones in their old one. This often results in unforeseen problems. These outside managers lack understanding of the different parts of the organization and their shared mission. Instead, they tend to develop their own fiefdoms. People may be brought into a company to provide management, but they still should be trained starting with the simplest tasks in their department, not the most complicated.
This is also a common problem in sales. Objects are easy to deal with. People are hard. Sales in different organizations may follow similar steps, but each step should be tailored to the organization’s unique competitive position. Sales training should always start at with the most common, basic tasks, graduating to tasks that require more and more knowledge over time. Salespeople have a much higher rate of turnover than other types of work because training in the important aspects of their job takes time to acquire.
Making Training Simple
<Command> <simple> <march>
Make your commands easy to follow.<Give> <crowd> <study> <obtain> <also>Then they will not obey.
You must understand the way a crowd thinks.
The goal is teaching new people initially in simple processes that they can easily master. Every job, even sales jobs, can initially be introduced through a series of tasks that have some value, but which can be performed after some basic training. The military model for training works. Everyone should get some level of “basic training,” at the beginning, for example, in organizational philosophy and mission, how the organization marches. Then, for more advanced training, successful people should advance to more specific tasks where errors can be easily caught and corrected.