Napoleon and Hitler would have been hopeless at business; so why is business obsessed with war?
FRANK JOHNSON
The new Times editor, Robert Thomson, is reported to be a student of Sun Tzu's Art of War (c. 500 ac). His having been long in the United States suggests that he might have been influenced by a widespread American belief that books about the arts of war can teach us about the art of business.
But, historically, business and moneymaking have been peaceful pursuits. Leftwingers claim the opposite. They point to the arms trade: a business dependent on war, its fear or threat. But that is like saying that the medicines trade depends on disease. There are far more examples of trade being dependent on peace and health. The CD business, for one, is dependent on love of music. Over the centuries, war-makers have tended to dislike moneymakers, and vice versa. For people who are not arms salesmen, the one gets in the way of the other. Cobden and Bright, the two names most associated with Victorian free trade, opposed the Victorian age's wars.
Yet the plumper, and less risk-taking, the American corporate executive, the more he is likely to talk about the need to 'kick ass' and 'take no prisoners'. I doubt if Washington, Grant and Lee talked like that. Over my lifetime, which has been passed since the second world war, the fewer the wars America has actually fought, the greater the aforementioned imagery among the American business class. I doubt if American businessmen who had actually been in the second world war talked violently about business afterwards. But all countries are the issue of their history. Perhaps the violence of American business language is due to the ancestral influence on simple American businessmen of the Wild West, or, rather, old films about the Wild West.
Whenever I visit the United States, one of the first things I do is consult the nearest bookshop's business section. Mainly, this is for amusement, and to indulge the Englishman's genial scorn for all this tough talk. But it is also to see whether American business has decided to make peace. It has not so far. Sometimes I bring home examples of these works to amuse like-minded Britons, I wonder if the new Times editor has been influenced by The Way of the Leader by Donald G. Krause, author of The Art of War for Executives. The front cover captures the book's purpose: 'Applying the principles of •Sun Tzu and Confucius — ancient strategies for the modern business world.' The back cover adds: 'The Way of the Leader brings the philosophical vision of The Art of War and The Analects of Confucius to the bottom line.'
Another collector's item is a 1998 English translation, published by Proctor Jones, San Francisco, of the Memoires du Baron Fain written not long after the fall of the Napoleonic empire. From 1806 to 1815. Fain was never far from Napoleon, day or night, ending as his personal secretary. His book is a wonderful source for how Napoleon worked. This American edition seems to be the only one available. It is certainly out of print in French, But the edition is entitled: 'Napoleon: How He Did It.' The text is prefaced by the assurance that 'Besides being a generally informative account, this work could be a businessschool textbook.' There follows a confident statement of the opposite of the truth: 'Napoleon faced all the problems that beset a modern businessman.'
I tried to think of a problem common to Napoleon and a modern businessman. True, Napoleon wanted to exclude British goods from the European continent. A modern French or German businessman, whose product competes with that of a Briton, must want to do that. But Napoleon tried to resolve the problem by imposing a blockade and, when Russia failed to observe it, by invading Russia. By 1812 it was clear that that had been what the Americans would describe as a bad business call. The only other person who tried to solve a similar problem in the same way was Hitler. Napoleon, then, faced all the problems that beset Hitler. Neither man can offer much of a guide as to how to run an American shopping mall, or the Times.
But Sun Tzu only offers a good guide as to how to run a war. He seems wiser than Clausewitz; or rather, than Clausewitz's 20th-century followers, mainly German. They emphasised Clausewitz's definition: 'To introduce into the philosophy of War itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity. War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.' They ignored the qualification to be found later in his book: states should not pursue wars beyond the wars' original objects; otherwise 'the means would lose all relation to the end'.
Sun Tzu also said more or less what Clausevvitz said in the latter's most famous pronouncement: the one about war being the continuation of politics by other means. In other words, the war must be supported by politicians and people back home. 'When you engage in actual fighting,' says Sun Tzu, 'if victory is long in coming, the men's weapons will grow dull and their ardour will be dampened, . if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the state will not be equal to the strain.'
Sun Tzu also emphasised the importance in war of guile and cunning. But those business books, drawing on Sun Tzu, do not much dwell on his more restrained passages. Instead, their gist is that Sun Tzu was in favour of generals displaying leadership, character, purpose, responsibility and knowledge. Therefore those are what businessmen should have. The books could just as well quote the requirements, in a human being, of Erasmus, Montaigne and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. But they would not make the average American fast-food franchise owner feel tough.
A wiser American, Brigadier General T.R. Phillips, in a 1940 introduction to The Art of War, told of how Sun Tzu replied 'Yes' when King Ho Lu asked him if it was possible to teach women to drill. The king's concubines were produced. But they kept on larking around. Sun Tzu had two beheaded. The drill was then perfect. If Mr Thomson is as violent in temperament as Sun Tzu's other readers in America, that story would guide him in dealing with any insubordination on the Times from, say, my friend, the columnist Miss Mary Ann Sieghart. But a closer reading of The Art of War would show that there is a more guileful way, such as promoting her.
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