Art of Leadership by Sun Tzu - A New-Millennium Bilingual Edition of Sun Tzu's Art of War

Subtitle: A New-Millennium Bilingual Edition of Sun Tzu's Art of War

The work by Sun Tzu (circa 535-483 BCE), in the form of 13 essays, was termed by him, simply, as Thirteen Essays. The work is a treatise on leadership -- by one who aspires to be a leader in war management, for the eyes of a leader in state governance. The label "Art of War" was added by an annotator, a leader in his own right, three quarters of a millennium later -- as was his name (Tzu = master, a reverential address; his original name was Sun Wu).

The following is from the preface: "[W]hile the world reveres at his war-specific contributions, important they assuredly are, Sun Wu has made, in my judgment, an even more important, though much subtler, contribution -- his view that war management is a profession, that war management is an exercise in leadership."

The thirteen essays are grouped into four parts, as follows:

Part I Top-Level Planning
Essay 1 Topmost-level planning
Essay 2 Total-resource planning
Essay 3 Strategic planning

Part II Field-Level Planning
Essay 4 Formation planning
Essay 5 Momentum planning
Essay 6 Preparedness planning

Part III Battlefield Strategies
Essay 7 Battlefield maneuvers
Essay 8 Battlefield contingencies
Essay 9 Battlefield logistics

Part IV Battlefield Management
Essay 10 Management of terrain
Essay 11 Deployment of field forces
Essay 12 Use of incendiary
Essay 13 Use of intelligence

This book differs from all other renditions currently on the market in one important respect: it is augmented by 26 cases, two for each eassy, closely coordinated to the text.

Eleven cases are war-related: Sun Wu (512 BCE), Alexander the Great at Hydaspes (312 BCE), Han Xin (203 BCE), American Revolution (1776), Napoleon's campaign in Russia (1812), American Civil War - Second Bull Run (1862), World War I - World's first tank battle (1917), World War II - Normandy (1944), Korean War (1951), Vietnam War (1954), Gulf Waw (1991)

Eleven cases are on Year 2000 Presidential Nomination Process - Iowa straw poll, Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary, Delaware primary, South Carolina primary (3 cases), Virginia ptimary, Super Tuesday

Three cases on war-simulation games - Xiangqi (203 BCE), western chess, Kriegspiel

One case on business

Taking a leaf from the author's translation of Confucius's Analects, this volume has the following features acclaimed by critics:

line-by-line bilingual text
meticulous annotation
year-by-year chronology
indexes (subject, cases on war, cases on politics, text

passages referenced in cases)