Volume 4

This is Volume Four (34 articles) of our Art of War Playbook. This part of the Playbook focuses on Sun Tzu's concepts for evaluating the probability of success in pursuing a given set of opportunities. The choice to pursue a given opportunity is based upon the relatively few things you can know before undertaking a project or campaign to explore it. The Playbook itself is the culmination of over a decade of work breaking down Sun Tzu's principles into a series of step-by-step practical articles by the Institute's multiple award-winning author and internationally recognized Art of War expert, Gary Gagliardi. The work explains the concepts in the verses of Sun Tzu's classic on strategy in detail, explaining the situations to which they apply the steps in Sun Tzu's system for using them with examples from modern competition. While the original Art of War was originally written for military generals who understood the philosophical concepts of ancient China, our Art of War Playbook is written for today's readers and provide enough descriptive material so that Sun Tzu's ideas can actually be used in everyday life. The Art of War Playbook puts Sun Tzu's ideas into everyday, practical language as a book of instruction. Because of its size and detail, the Playbook is published in nine volumes. This is just the fourth volume. The concepts covered in this volume are listed below: Contents Playbook Overview About Positions About Probability 4.0 Leveraging Probability 4.1 Future Potential 4.2 Choosing Non-Action 4.3 Leveraging Form 4.3.1 Tilted Forms 4.3.2 Fluid Forms 4.3.3 Soft Forms 4.3.4 Neutral Forms 4.4 Strategic Distance 4.4.1 Physical Distance 4.4.2 Intellectual Distance 4.5 Opportunity Surfaces 4.5.1 Surface Area 4.5.2 Surface Barriers 4.5.3 Surface Holding Power 4.6 Six Benchmarks 4.6.1 Spread-Out Conditions 4.6.2 Constricted Conditions 4.6.3 Barricaded Conditions 4.6.4 Wide-Open Conditions 4.6.5 Fixed Conditions 4.6.6 Sensitive Conditions 4.7 Competitive Weakness 4.7.1 Command Weaknesses 4.7.2 Group Weaknesses 4.8 Climate Support 4.9 Opportunity Mapping Art of War Playbook Series About the Author Other Art of War Books Glossary of Key Concepts The Nine Volumes of the Playbook cover the following topics: 1. Positions, 2. Perspective, 3. Opportunities, 4. Probability, 5. Mistakes, 6. Situations, 7. Momentum, 8. Rewards, and 9. Vulnerabilities.