Business Plan Tips: Ancient Business Architects

Business strategy actually has its roots in some fairly ancient disciplines. And tho of my favorite sort of ancient strategies are both Asian. One is called Mayamoto Mushi. He's Japanes samurai who lived around in the 15 and 1600s. He wrote a book called the five rings.

One of the key notions about that Mushi brought forward is the idea that if you're going to be succesfull, you have to understand your competitor intimately. What he's going to do. And you also have to be intimately familiar with your own tools of your trade if you're going to be succesfull.

These are keys to strategy today, and we often forget these kinds of things. Study your competition, and understand intimately how to use the tools of your trade and what you do. That's fow you'r going to be more effective.

The second is Sun Tzu, who was a Chinese general who developed thirteen principles of strategy. And I won't try to go into all of them, but one of the keys was, that was probably his most important principle, was that an effective strategy is one that avoid direct confrontation. Costly battles. And the idea is not to run away from them, but convince your competitor that they really don't want to compete in the space you're competinng in.

Two great lessons from ancient strategist that can really help you in your own business strategy today, even thougt those were thousands of years ago.


Source: YouTube