Rethinking Thinking: Problem Solving from Sun Tzu to Google

By Martin Cohen

How do generals - and business strategists - outwit their opponents?
Where do designers and artists get their inspiration from?
How can all of us 'pump up the originality' and steer our thinking off the standard, well-worn tracks?

Everyone, as the French philosopher René Descartes pointed out long ago, thinks. That's the easy bit. The harder part, and what this book is really about, is how to make your thinking original and effective. And here the problem is that too often we don't really engage the gears of our brain, don’t really look at issues in an original or active way, we just respond. Like computers, inputs are processed according to established rules and outputs are thus largely predetermined. Yet that’s not what makes us human and that’s not where the big prizes in life are to be found.
In the third millennium, we need to think a bit more - not less! And so the focus in this book is on practical suggestions about ways to think better... on thinking strategies that each have their own style, applications and benefits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788360852

Martin Cohen

Martin Cohen earned his MS in Psychology through the California State University, Los Angeles, and his PhD from International College, Los Angeles. He was in private practice in Los Angeles, California, where he was also Clinical Director of MidValley Counseling and Psychological Services, and was the administrator for Psychiatric and Psychological Testing Services. Dr. Cohen has also been a clinician with the Center for Family Development in Eugene, Oregon.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Thinking like a Chinese General

1.jpg

Page from work attributed to Sun Tzu, 544–496 BCE

I wouldn’t say the Chinese invented the art of thinking, but they certainly produced one of the first books about it when the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (and likely other sages too) compiled The Art of War, no less than 2500 years ago.

Originally, it was very much a guide to military strategy, but don’t be confused by that. This is a book offering insights into all kinds of problems—challenges if you prefer—that we all meet in life. But in terms of ‘thinking hats’, meaning different strategies for approaching issues, the ‘hat’ you want to wear here is not so much a tin helmet as the kind of baseball cap favoured by leaders from Trump to Obama, and film directors from John Huston to Steven Spielberg. What does that kind of peaked cap signify? That you’re in charge of the situation and managing the details. It’s quintessentially the kind of message leaders of all stripes want to send. And so, today, The Art of War has evolved from a guide for generals to being considered the classic work on action directed towards achieving precise ends. Life strategies, business strategies, military strategies. Hundreds of books examining its insights have been published in many different languages, and its ideas have been applied to fiefs as diverse as business management and training in sports.

Surely one of the most unusual ‘book endorsement’ quotes ever was offered by Chairman Mao in the middle of the twentieth century when he claimed the book as an inspiration for his guerrilla warfare, saying:

We must not belittle the saying in the book of Sun Wu Tzu, the great military expert of ancient China, ‘Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster.’

Indeed, the advice of Sun Tzu was followed during the Vietnam War when some Vietcong officers are known to have extensively studied The Art of War and to have liked to recite entire passages from memory. General Võ Nguyên Giáp, an avid student of Sun Tzu’s ideas, successfully implemented tactics described in the classic text during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ending major French involvement in Indochina and leading to the accords which partitioned Vietnam into North and South. Indeed, it was America’s defeat there, more than any other event, that brought Sun Tzu to the attention of leaders of American military theory and thus to today’s business leaders.

Likewise, the Korean resistance army defeated the vastly better-armed United States military by cunning tricks, shortcuts and rigging the odds in their favour—the strategic significance of which has never really been accepted by the US. Looking back on the lessons of that war in 2017, in an article for Foreign Policy magazine, Paul Yingling, one of whose roles was as the chief war planner for the US Army’s 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea, recalled that he had spent ‘considerable time’ studying not merely the Korean War but the links to Sun Tzu’s teachings, including this passage:

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

He realised that the United States should have had a lot to learn from the ancient classic but had failed to change its thinking. Worse still, Yingling wrote, Sun Tzu outlined all the options and ‘we still picked the worst of the lot’. The options being, at the top, using the highest form of generalship to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best being to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next, attacking the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all being to besiege walled cities. Despite this advice, Yingling finishes: ‘most of my training as a war planner consisted of exercises devoted to attacking the enemy’s army and besieging walled cities (or at least prepared defences).’

Put another way, one of the factors that make a general great, and therefore rather a rare creature, is the willingness to withstand the desire of most people to rush headlong into direct engagements and instead to work out patiently how to go around rather than through his opponent… choosing the course of least expectation and the line of least resistance. ‘Doing things the easy way’ is perhaps the core message of The Art of War, and it is advice which, like much Chinese wisdom, is both wonderfully simple and somehow impenetrable.

It is also known that during the Cold War years the KGB studied—and used—the strategy of deception at the heart of the book. Sun Tzu’s words, ‘I will force the enemy to take our strength for weakness, and our weakness for strength, and thus will turn his strength into weakness’, rang true for the Bolsheviks.

Maybe that’s why Douglas MacArthur, 5 Star General & Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, is reputed to have always kept a copy of The Art of War on his desk, although it may have been more of a fashion statement than a practical resource as the general is also remembered for wearing a Japanese ceremonial kimono, cooling himself with an oriental fan, and smoking cigarettes in a jewelled cigarette holder. On the other hand, in the early 1990s, American Gulf War generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell are known to have adapted ideas from the book to ruthless and deadly effect on Saddam Hussein’s desert battalions. For them, the ‘easy way’ involved ideas like ‘outmanoeuvring’ and using ‘overwhelming force’—which is why Saddam’s conscripts were killed in their tens of thousands by bombs dropped from planes invisibly high in the sky.

The Gulf War showed that the book had plenty of fans amongst real-life generals. However, as I say, in crucial ways, the text is only superficially about military tactics. Like all great books, it is at heart about human needs and values. As, too, ultimately are thinking skills. It is for this reason that an otherwise actually rather impenetrable and obscure (impeccably Chinese) ancient text contains insights, even for some of today’s busiest business leaders.

Mind you, I suspect Sun Tzu’s wisdom often gets rather lost in translation. Take one of his favourite metaphors about the leader being the ‘hub at the centre of the wheel’. Today’s business gurus habitually say that this is in contrast to the Western view of leadership, where leaders are at the top of the organization with the workforce serving them in ever more remote ‘layers’. They insist that, in Sun Tzu’s model, leaders position themselves at the centre and actively control the whole organization. These active CEOs are like the centre of a wheel in that they connect to everything, just as all of the spokes meet at the hub. The only problem is that if the hub is not strong enough the wheel will inevitably collapse.

However, fine point though this may or may not be, it is not Sun Tzu’s one. Indeed, his is rather the opposite! And this is because The Art of War is also a work of Taoist philosophy, and there is an old Taoist saying that we see the spokes in the wheel but it is ‘the empty centre that lets the wheel move’. It is the empty quality of the centre that matters, not its ‘strength’, far less any notion of directing the spokes. Disciples of Taoism will know that this is a school that just loves ‘emptiness’, indeed the whole philosophy compares itself to the space contained by an empty bowl.

Like a bowl, it may be used, but is never emptied, it is bottomless, the ancestor of all things, it blunts sharpness, it unties knots, it softens the light, it becomes one with the dusty world. Deep and still, it exists forever…

Work that one out, General! But perhaps one message is clear: rather than having strong leaders directing everything, in Sun Tzu’s model invisible leaders quietly coordinate. Power comes from this subtle role. You no longer have to ‘own things’ to coordinate them.

Despite such misconceptions and misreadings (or maybe a bit because of them), the book has become a modern business favourite. Nowhere more so than in Japan. Here, companies make the book required reading for their key executives. One result could be that the CEOs of their giant corporations tend to ‘encourage and facilitate’ rather than conduct themselves like little kings, as CEOs so often do on the West. Another surely is that Japanese business follows Sun Tzu’s advice about the importance of research. Rather than invent products from scratch, they take a long and careful look at whatever is currently successful, and, well, copy it. Or ‘build on it’, if you prefer.

Given the advice of The Art of War, it is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that both Japanese and Chinese corporations should be regularly accused of ‘spying’ on Western companies and copying their innovations. Not fair! But learning from what others have already done is a very effective strategy. ‘Not fair’, and yet one of the best kept secrets of US business is that a vast amount of US tax dollars is directed by the National Security Agency (NSA) specifically to do much the same thing. Let’s pause a moment and look at one much under-reported way in which a piece of Sun Tzu’s military wisdom has been absorbed into civilian life in America. Today, the NSA spends billions of dollars every year to eavesdrop, not on the Ruskies, but on everyday exchanges between businessmen, including the conversations of allies in countries like Germany and Japan. The links between talk about military tactics and company plans seems almost inevitable when you consider that the US security establishment itself today is a giant business made up of huge defence contractors: corporations like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and Endgame, via less well-known companies like Booz Allen and Hamilton, who employed not only the now famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden but also one Mike McDonnell. What’s so interesting about Mike McDonnell? Yet he is himself a former head of the NSA. Scarcely surprising then that Booz has been entrusted with so many juicy defence contracts out of an NSA ‘secret-defense’ budget estimated at around $10 billion a year. The NSA’s centre for stocking computer records at Bluffdale, Utah, cost on its own $2 billion at 2019 prices.

Pause for a moment to think about the size of these sums. How can information from ‘spying’ be worth anything like this? Yet particularly in today’s high-tech world it very easily can be.

The official title of the Utah centre is ‘Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center’, but the reality is, as the French newspaper Le Figaro put it on 5 July 2013, quoting an unnamed senior figure in the French defence department who had been entertained at secret briefings in Fort Meade (the ones that Snowden leaked the Powerpoints of), ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘the NSA has been 80% preoccupied with economic intelligence.’ Actually, it goes back well before that too. On 8 August 1975, NSA Director Lt General Lew Allen admitted to the Pike Committee of the US House of Representatives that the ‘NSA systematically intercepts international communications, both voice and cable’.

Spying—or shall we say, more neutrally, ‘obtaining good information before acting’—is the strategy at the heart of The Art of War. Those of us accustomed to thinking of warfare as being something to do with guns and battles struggle to see how eavesdropping on businessmen fits in. But the activities are intertwined, even if, of course, so secretive that what goes on is rarely made public. However, in the 1990s, concern about eavesdropping on private American citizens led to the curtain being tweaked to some extent.

It was at this time that a hefty supply contract with Saudi Arabia negotiated by the European business Airbus instead ended up with McDonnell-Douglas, the rival of the Airbus consortium, because the former was privy to the financial terms offered by Airbus thanks to the electronic interception system. A well-informed press report in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 noted that: ‘from a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium, Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition.’

Similarly, the French electronics giant Thomson-CSF lost a $1.4 billion contract—for a satellite surveillance system for monitoring drug trafficking and deforestation in the forests of the Brazilian Amazon—to Raytheon, the Massachusetts-based company that makes the famous Patriot and Sidewinder missiles. This, after the Americans intercepted phone calls and details of the negotiations and passed them on to the corporation—which announced appreciatively that ‘the Department of Commerce worked very hard in support of U.S. industry on this project’, which is a nice way to look at it.

This spying is just a snapshot from a period in which the media discovered the story, and public bodies started investigating. But the year before, that is in 1993, President Clinton extended US intelligence support to commercial organisations by creating a new National Economic Council, paralleling the National Security Council. The nature of this intelligence support was widely reported. As the Baltimore Sun again put it in 1995: ‘Former intelligence officials and other experts say tips based on spying… regularly flow from the Commerce Department to U.S. companies to help them win contracts overseas.’ The same newspaper obtained reports from the Commerce Department demonstrating intelligence support to US companies.

One such document consists of minutes from an August 1994 Commerce Department meeting intended to identify major contracts open for bid in Indonesia in order to help US companies win the work. A CIA employee spoke at the meeting; and five of the 16 people on the routine distribution list for the minutes were from the CIA!

Other accounts published both by reputable journalists as well as some first-hand witnesses cite occasions on which the US government has utilised covertly intercepted communications for national commercial purposes. These included data about the emission standards of Japanese vehicles; trade negotiations concerning the import of Japanese luxury cars; French participation in the GATT trade negotiations in 1993; and the plans of the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), in 1997.

After such triumphs of US communications intelligence came to light, and most particularly those detailing the derailing of trade deals for European companies like Airbus in favour of US contractors, a delegation of MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) was sent to Washington—but they returned empty-handed. The matter was simply ‘too secret’ to even talk about, they were told.

So it was left to an American Civil Liberties Union Report, ‘The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society’, to identify the close, not to say incestuous, relationship of large corporations with the security agencies within the US five years later, in August 2004. And if, of course, I can’t prove that Sun Tzu’s book helped point the United States security apparatus in this direction, well, it would be hard to find another book that makes the point so firmly. Forget fighting battles: information is power.

I myself first wrote about the extensive network of US spy stations in 1999 in a book called No Holiday. At the time, I lived near one, in fact, called Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire. This is a surreal installation of geodesic domes resembling giant golf balls dropped into a gently undulating moorland landscape of purple heather. Yet here’s the thing about information: almost invariably it is already out there, available for you to discover and make use of—if only you know where to look for it. However, there’s a kind of mini-industry in persuading us that everything important has to be invented or discovered afresh. That’s why, in June 2013, even this thoroughly researched and much debated issue of NSA spying had to be ‘revealed’ as if it was a brand new thing by the editor of the London Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, and his US deputy, Janine Gibson, as part of a show with Charlie Rose on PBS in America unveiling the ‘revelations’, as the paper put it on the website.

Although it is very difficult to quantify the scale of industrial espionage, the European Parliament report mentioned above estimated that even in the 1990s, globally, about 15–20 billion euros—say 25 billion dollars—was being expended annually on the interception of communications and related activities. That’s a lot of money, but it isn’t just about countries not trusting the Soviets, or even about companies grabbing contracts, it’s about nations vacuuming up ideas too.

Because, which of these do you think is the most important factor for business success? A great idea—or having lots of money? Humble folk tend to think it is the latter, but the fact is, there’s plenty of businesses that started off with millions in the bank, but quickly burnt through it and ended up with nothing. In fact, great ideas are worth more than money or, at the very least, potentially worth ‘a lot’ of money. And where do ideas come from? From talking to interesting people? Sure. From TV and radio? Why not. Of course, lots of ideas can be found in the form of articles, reports and books. But some big, ‘ready-made’ ideas can be obtained by spying.

So, although the thirteen chapters of The Art of War include such things as ‘using the lie of the land in your advantage’ and tips on deploying ‘fiery weapons’ that look not only hopelessly dated but rather nerdish, I would say it is the advice about the importance of information that is the key part of the guidance on how to achieve your goals. And all the other advice comes back to this