Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is considered essential reading in many disciplines, but is not typically a requirement for students of Information Technology. I posit, however, that Sun Tzu’s teachings can be applied across many disciplines (I’ll even go as far as to claim any discipline), including IT.
With this series of posts, I intend to pull out key phrases from The Art of War and show how their principles can be applied within various IT disciplines. Not all of Sun Tzu’s wisdom can be directly applied, so I will not be performing a verse-by-verse analysis. There are, however, some sections or verses which should lend themselves to certain IT situations such as building and maintaining infrastructure, security strategies (lots there) and disaster recovery tactics. Here I intend to share with you my IT-focused ideas, as inspired by Sun Tzu.
For this series, I will read through this translation available from Project Gutenberg. All of my section/verse references will refer to that translation. Note that the translator’s notes are included in this version.
As an aside, I highly encourage everyone to explore Project Gutenburg’s catalog of works, as it is the largest repository of public domain e-texts that I know of, and has many classics available to download for free.
Next time: The core of Laying Plans.