Bruce Webster recently updated his " The Art of ‘Ware " originally published by M&T Books in 1995. As the title suggests, this interpretation of Sun Tzu's Art Of War is about creating and marketing IT products & services.
Since the Art of War can be applied to numerous if not countless domains, Bruce also invites people of other industries to send him their own insights and observations. Go here if you want to participate.
Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the heads up.
post-scriptum #1 : you may want to look who's the smart reader on the photo. In the meantime, you can visit sonshi.com for everything Sun Tzu.
post-scriptum #2 : here is the comment I left on Guy's blog.
Back in late 1999, Agilent Technologies, the T&M Test & Measurement spin-off of HP Hewlett-Packard, decided to become a key player in the Telecoms Networks I&M Installation & Maintenance market segment. #1 T&M vendor, leader in the Lab & Production testing business, Agilent was still a small challenger in the I&M field : no brand recognition, no significant marketshare, no visibility at all except with some loyal HP customers here and there.
In less than 3 years, Agilent became #1 Fiber Optics Test Equipment vendor, according to a Frost & Sullivan' s report published in 2002. Even better, a product which was of interest for a very small portion of the Telecoms industry at this time - remember the Bubble ? - got a tremendous press coverage for its launch in March 2002 (by the way, in our case PR worked pretty well ;-). In parallel, Agilent's I&M test markeshare almost doubled in the US by the end of 2002.
How did Agilent achieved such outstanding results ? Sun Tzu. We simply applied the Art Of War.
As a challenger, we acted as a challenger - which was quite interesting in the context of Agilent, provided that the whole company was (is still) set to act as a leader (you know what I mean...). For instance, we overcomed our rivals by applying the strategy described by Bruce in the Chapter 3: "Sizing up the Competition".
Since I left Agilent back in 2003, I've got to learn many other markets outside telecoms, working with several companies in different areas : the only ones who win are the ones who apply the Art of War. That might seem dumb, but it's the very truth.
