Business Warfare - by Paulo Cardoso Do Amaral

About the Book

Business Warfare provides a framework for business strategy based on Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Foch and Machiavelli.

Book Synopsis

Sun Tzu provides great teachings for battleground struggles, so why do we need more authors and insights? Because Sun Tzu deals with confrontation, and that's not enough. There are currently more factors influencing any entity's strategic positioning than just fighting for consumers, customers, and clients-unexpected factors beyond eyesight at battleground level, like regulations and political moves unleashed by stakeholders.

Enter Clausewitz, delivering a broad inclusion of the factors currently influencing business. He invites the strategist to contemplate political level actions besides war, something not so extensively covered by Sun Tzu. And the wisdom in Clausewitz's Trinity concept is a bedrock for a solid, encompassing, and enlightened strategic appraisal well beyond traditional methodologies.

The book also covers Sun Tzu's dynamic approach to struggle, on a substratum of situational awareness, which other others tend to miss when analyzing The Art of War. Situational awareness is critical in business strategy. And Sun Tzu's strategic vision is bottom-up-refreshing because traditional strategic planning has been primarily top-down.

Then came Ferdinand Foch3/4a mandatory add-on for developing Sun Tzu's framework. It acknowledges the need to measure tactical effectiveness, otherwise, how do you choose among different tactical choices?

Machiavelli pops up next. Whereas Sun Tzu deals with battle, Machiavelli specializes in what to do with victory. For businesses, that means profit. And how do you make a profit? By winning everybody's hearts, and that is Machiavelli's specialty.

If you live in a predictable and stable competitive environment, this book is not for you. If not, and you need strategic thinking, the practical frameworks put forward will foster your insights.

Paulo Cardoso do Amaral has an extensive background in engineering, information systems, and business management. In addition to his corporate roles, Paulo is an MBA Professor at CatólicaLisbon, and since 2014, he has been teaching at Bejing's Tsinghua University and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. Paulo has a deep connection with military education, having been a professor at the Portuguese Air Force Academy, the Portuguese Army Military Academy, and the Command and General Staff Officers' Course for the three branches of the Portuguese Army.

Review Quotes

This is a very important and rather rare book on Business Warfare. It offers a very rich and inspiring content on various military tactics and associated leadership styles and invites corporate managers to reflect on the lessons learned from these when formulating their business strategies.

Only someone like Paulo Amaral can write such a book! Indeed, his military genes (being the son and grandson of military officers) and studies at a military school in addition to his extensive teaching experience in business schools, makes him uniquely positioned to write on the applicability and benefits of military strategies to business corporations.

--Dr. Tawfik Jelassi, Ph.D., Professor and former Corporate Board Chair

Make no mistake, most current approaches to business strategy will not last forever; they come and go, like all fashions. The strategic ideas of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Machiavelli, however, are forever; they have stood the test of time and have influenced generations of leaders, yet they remain absent in most business conversations. In this fascinating book, Paulo Amaral presents the ideas of these strategic masters in a way that makes them accessible to today's practicing managers. It's time to restore historically big thinkers to our strategy conversations.

--Bill Fischer, Emeritus Professor of Innovation Management, IMD, Senior Lecturer, Sloan School of Management, MIT

Paulo Amaral's serendipitous encounter has yielded a fascinating read bristling with historical facts, business analogies, practical tools and a rich set of templates to equip executives to survey their business territory from a broad range of viewpoints which will undoubtedly yield fresh insights and new routes to success.

--Paul Hunter, Director of Programs and Learning Design, IMD Business School

Business Warfare offers a framework for revised business approaches based on the philosophies of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Foch and Machiavelli. While prior familiarity with these thinkers is not a prerequisite (because Paulo Cardoso do Amara deftly covers their philosophies in the course of his discussion), independent reading will certainly lend a deeper understanding as to why Cardoso do Amaral's building blocks of business revision are so productive and important.

Readers with entrepreneurial interests who already know of these ideas will have a leg up on this book's expanded insights and business applications. While they may, for example, know of Sun Tzu's writings, Cardoso do Amara offers specific applications and extrapolations key to understanding how cultural and business warfare coalesce and clash.

Even more importantly, Business Warfare invites a dialogue between business, political, and personal interests which reveals the boundaries of these three intersections and how players in different infrastructures and belief systems interact on many levels. This, in turn, represents both heady, thought-provoking reading and a call to action based on revised perceptions and thinking about all kinds of business and social issues. . .

By deploying a battle strategy approach to better understand leadership, innovation, and impact, Cardoso do Amara's multifaceted book evolves within and possibly even beyond business special interests, creating a discussion that will prove vivid and unique to business leaders who traditionally receive pat answers and set programs and approaches to achievement from their business reading.

This is why business libraries and college-level discussion groups need to make Business Warfare an essential collection addition. Its juxtaposition of social inquiry, psychological insight, and business applications makes it a standout in business literature.

--D. Donovan, Midwest Book Review