Competitive Strategies Case Study

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: Industry Analysis Exercise (A)

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Abstract:
Sun Tzu's The Art of War, written 2,500 years ago holds powerful lessons for running businesses, managing people, honing leadership abilities, motivating the employees, preparing for a battle, etc. If the book is used in a highly structured way to underscore the underpinnings of priceless wisdom contained throughout the book, the derived learning would be highly enriching. No doubt, the book’s principles can be applied across all the functional areas of management – may it be manufacturing/production, marketing, finance, HR or any other dimension of managing a company. Most interestingly and effectively, the book's powerful lessons can be related to Strategy course, especially for analysing industries. When this book is used for analysing an industry, along with the other established industry analysis tools and techniques, the students would have definitely widened their horizons. To that end, this note provides how competition shapes up the strategy making, an overview of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and how to go about integrating this book with industry analysis exercise. A set of 100 MCQs and two videos (one on Indian Banking Industry and other on Indian Telecom Industry) are also available along with this note.

Pedagogical Objectives:

Keywords :  Leadership, Military, The Art of War, RMAS, Henry Fayol, Sandhurst, Strategy, Sun Tzu, Warfare, Culture, Wars, Crisis, HRM, Marketing, Drucker

Contents : 
Competition and The Art of War
A Classroom Exercise
The Use of Spies
The Nine Situations
Weak Points & Strong