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Nearly 2500 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, a book that provided emperors and military leaders with methods to achieve success on the battlefield. Those same strategies and tactics will also work on the battlefield of the healthcare war that is going to take place in the very near future. Perhaps we can go back in time and learn the valuable lessons that were used so successfully and apply them to modern healthcare to help us through the quagmire of the healthcare crisis. This article was inspired by the book Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, by Mark McNeilly (Oxford University Press, 2011).
KEY WORDS: Sun Tzu; The Art of War; competition; marketing.
The first three chapters of Sun Tzu's timeless classic The Art of War describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary, and how to formulate strategy. Sun Tzu states that by knowing your enemy and knowing yourself, you will never be defeated, even in a hundred battles. When you are ignorant of the enemy but knowyourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle. This advice holds true now more than ever before. We know that we are healers and that our mission is to make our patients well and to follow the Hippocratic oath. If we make every effort to do what's in the best interest of the patient, then we won't be disappointed by the outcome, regardless of the financial consequences.
Though it was written 2500 years ago in China, it is arguably the most important work on the subject of strategy in the world today. There have been thousands of books in the past decade purporting to adapt Sun Tzu's sublime Eastern battle philosophy to winning in Western business endeavors. Many of these same strategies and tactics used in war and in business can be transferred to the practice and the business of medicine.
Sun Tzu counseled self-knowledge and restraint. "Subduing the other's military without battle is the most skillful" tactic, says Sun Tzu. The Chinese symbol for crisis contains the words for both danger and opportunity....