There's
always that guy at your job, the Sun Tzu guy. He's forever sending
you email memos with Sun Tzu quotes. Maybe he even has a Sun Tzu
quote italicized & in red or blue below his email signature . . .
so much heavier than your run-of-the-mill Zig Ziglar quote.
So much ballsier. Brass balls, about THIS BIG. Sun Tzu guy is the Ayn Rand Viking, the guy who really felt all those old Rush songs.
You
just want to punch that guy. And you would, 'cept he's pretty much
always your boss, and post-colonial libertarian capitalism frowns
upon smacking down your boss.
I
do understand the attraction. Sun Tzu is simple, straightforward,
self-evident . . . okay, no, I don't understand the attraction
at all. I would have cursed every minute I spent reading the damn
thing, except I did it on the clock, so the boss paid me to read it.
Not that he knew. I had Von Clausewitz on deck, but I figured enough
was enough. When you get kicked out of the queue by Proust, you know
your days are numbered.
But
yeah, I guess Sun Tzu's Art of War makes you a big, brash,
masculine intellectual, with the emphasis on big, brash, and
masculine. It makes you a real dickswinger, a real John Galt, a
total Master of the Universe. It makes you the guy who knows
how to get things done, as all the erectile dysfunction ads
like to say.
I
suppose I shouldn't be blaming all this on Sun Tzu, but the Sun Tzu
guy makes it hard.
Anyway, here's the
quote you see most often:
III:18 - [. . .] If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,you will succumb in every battle.
Well,
thank you Mr. Obvious. If you know your capabilities, and you know
the capabilities of your enemy, then you will win. Like, I know my
game, I know Metta World Peace's game, Metta doesn't know my game, so
. . . I'm pretty sure that won't make a damn bit of difference when
he takes me to the rack.
Seriously,
though: the Sun Tzu guy runs this every few months (either he has no
short term memory, or he doesn't mind repeating himself, I'm not sure
which) as an admonishment to KNOW OUR CUSTOMERS. Which, of course,
is good advice. If you expect to be able to sell somebody something,
you have to know her/his hot buttons, and you have to have an honest
assessment of your own selling skills, so you can best tailor your
pitch to connect to those hot buttons. Again, I hardly think we need
EFFING SUN TZU to reveal these truths to us, but whatever.
But, really, it's not that simple, is it? Because, in this formulation, the customer is our enemy. I suppose you could denature the term “enemy” for this context . . . but, if the customer is the enemy for III:18, then the customer is the enemy for the entirety of The Art of War. Which is problematic, since the central axiom for The Art of War is
I:18 – All war is based on deception.
And
while that may not be problematic for some used car salesmen, they're
hardly the type that need to resort to Sun Tzu for justification in
the first place.
*
* * * *
Turns
out that Sun Tzu guy is just riding a wave crashing into the shore,
strutting on the beach while hell breaks loose all around him, just
like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse
Now.
He is the vanguard in the militarization of abso-freaking-lutely
everything, from the WAR ON POVERTY to the WAR ON DRUGS to THE WAR ON
TERROR. Welcome to THE WAR ON THE CUSTOMER.
*An aside: just once, I wish people would remember that war is a mode of interaction between nation states, and reserve use of the word for that purpose. Alas, I dream in vain. So back to THE WAR ON THE CUSTOMER . . .
There
is
clearly
a strain of the adversarial in the relationship between customer and
seller. The customer feels the need to “battle” with the
salesman for the best deal, the salesman “battles” to hold profit
in what he is selling. It is this “profit” over which the
customer and the salesman battle: he who holds the position of
strength will win. You can be sure that this capitalist relationship
is built on an inequality, just as you can be sure Sun Tzu guy is
prepared to fight for that position of strength.
Against
that there's been a new-agey trend toward “customer satisfaction”,
ranging from simply “providing solutions” all the way to
“connecting with the customer's inner desires”. It's gone beyond
just doing your best to take care of the customer; “customer
service” has morphed into a mantra, almost a mode of being (“You
have entered the
customer service zone”).
There have been TED talks, of that you can be sure. This new age of
retail is about service accelerated into a mystical, transcendental
realm; and it's never about the “purchase”, it's about the
“experience”. The salesman is converted from warrior to shaman,
leading the customer through the what
and the how
to the great universal WHY,
discovering the hole in the soul of the customer that needs to be
filled with a product . . .
On
one hand we have the great capitalist warrior, girded for battle with
Sun Tzu stuffed into his codpiece. On the other we have
salesman-as-spirit-guide, helping the customer actualize her/his
inner desires. At some point there's a collision here. Or is there?
Not
so much. The whole idea of connecting with your customer is nothing
more than the stagecraft in what Burroughs called “the long con”,
or part of the process of what J. K. Galbraith calls “manufacturing
desire”. As far as that goes, it's right in Sun Tzu's wheelhouse
as well: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without
fighting.” Ideally, the customer decides whatever he is buying is
worth the money, and doesn't even think about what it may have cost
to produce, like the guy who ponies up two bucks for a small can of
Red Bull that cost pennies to make (even after Red Bull Inc. walks
into the advertising marketplace with a suitcase full of greenbacks
and MAKES IT RAIN!).
At
the end of the day, it's all about coercion. The celebrated freedom
of liberal democratic capitalism is freedom from physical coercion;
but that doesn't mean that the parties are operating from a position
of equality. Exploitation always comes into play, be it benign (like
my good friend who always gives me amazing guitars and amps on long
term loan, and always manages to “finally put it up for sale”
just about the time my tax return is due) or less so (q: when is a
simple molded plastic face mask worth a whopping $135? a: when it's
connected to a machine that helps you breathe). Exploiting, taking
advantage, winning . . . indeed, that is what Sun Tzu is all about.
*
* * * *
Not
that Sun Tzu guy follows the train all the way into the station. He
still looks at me like I'm a complete fool when I try to discuss his
reading of Sun Tzu with him. Sun Tzu guy is convinced that I'm an
idiot who will never get it, and that's okay. The less I talk to Sun
Tzu guy, the better.
Sun
Tzu actually can function in a somewhat more benign way if you merely
adjust the schema slightly: if you think of your competition as the
enemy, and the customer as your field of operations, then you are
deceiving your competition, not lying to your customer. Chapter X of
The
Art of War,
“Terrain”, is
a topographical/geographical delineation of a theater of war; and as
such the summary unspoken commandment becomes “know your theater of
war”, which can easily be shifted to “know your customer base”
. . . know the terrain upon which your battles will be fought.
Not nearly as clean, simple, or FREAKING OBVIOUS as “If you know
the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles”, but conceptually much tighter.
But
of course, we know that the original intent is much closer to actual
fact. All war is based on deception. All sales are a con job.
Sometimes we're in on the joke, sometimes the joke's on us; but
there's always a joke. And you know what really sucks about that?
It's Sun Tzu guy's joke.
