Despite changes in technology, The Art of War has endured for 2,500 years as a military handbook, and its strategic thinking continues to be embraced in contexts other than the battlefield. As if to demonstrate the need for a new translation of the Chinese classic, University of California, Berkeley’s Michael Nylan compares a bit of hers in the introduction to the same passage as rendered by three predecessors in the last century. Hers reads clearer to contemporary eyes. The Master Sun, as the legendary author calls himself, advises able leaders to weigh the options, calculate the odds, know your enemy, know yourself. Behind the archaic imagery of chariots and siege-engines are insights applicable at the office. “To be good at unleashing surprise is to be as various as the cosmos itself,” he counsels.
