The ‘Art of War’ Lesson Every MBA Missed — and Every Startup Should Fear
- ecmadore2
- Jan 16
- 3 min read
Note to Reader: The Art of War is thought to have been written around 475–221 BCE. Its strategic principles are studied world wide in military academies and business schools.
“For 2,500 years, leaders have relied on his framework. Sun Tzu outlines five distinct types of intelligence sources. Here they are, translated for the modern CEO, founder, or strategist. The term spy refers to a source of intelligence on the strategy, tactics, and resources of your opponent.
The 5 “Spies” Every Business Must Cultivate
Sun Tzu’s system isn’t just a list; it’s an interconnected web. He called it the “divine thread,” a secret weapon for any leader.
1. The Local Spy (Your Customer’s World)
Sun Tzu’s definition: Using the enemy’s local countrymen.
The Modern Equivalent: This is your dissatisfied customer base — your rival’s, that is. It’s the user on Reddit complaining about a competitor’s pricing. It’s the local business in a new market telling you what “the big guys” always get wrong.
How to use them: Stop reading sanitized market reports. Go read the 1-star reviews of your competition. Get in the forums. Talk to the people who are living the problem you claim to solve. This is “getting out of the building,” as Steve Blank would say.
2. The Internal Spy (The Competitor’s Talent)
Sun Tzu’s definition: Using the enemy’s officials.
The Modern Equivalent: This is hiring key talent from your competitors. When Google wanted to build its own chips, it hired engineers from Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm. They didn’t just get engineering skill; they got intelligence. They learned what their rivals had tried, what had failed, and what was on their roadmap.
How to use them: When you hire from a rival, your onboarding shouldn’t just be about HR forms. It should be a strategic debrief. What processes worked over there? What frustrated the team? What was the “big project” everyone was excited about?
3. The Dead Spy (The Strategic Decoy)
Sun Tzu’s definition: Spreading misinformation to the enemy.
The Modern Equivalent: This is a strategic “vaporware” leak. It’s about controlling the narrative to make your competitor waste resources. Remember when tech companies would “accidentally” leak specs for a new product? Competitors would scramble to match a feature that was never even planned for production, burning precious time and R&D cycles.
How to use them: This is a high-level strategic move. By signaling a move into one market (e.g., “Project X”), you can distract rivals while you quietly conquer another (your real “Project Y”).
4. The Living Spy (The Deep-Dive Agent)
Sun Tzu’s definition: The spy who returns with a report.
The Modern Equivalent: This is your dedicated competitive intelligence professional. It’s the product manager who spends a week only using a competitor’s product. It’s the sales engineer who goes to a rival’s conference, sits in on all the sessions, talks to their partners, and comes back with a full report on their morale, strategy, and tech.
How to use them: Don’t just browse a competitor’s website. Sign up for their product (pay for it!). Call their sales team. Go through their entire customer journey. You’ll learn more in one day than in a month of analyzing web traffic.
The One Agent Who Unlocks Them All
You might be reading this and thinking, “This sounds manipulative and unethical.”
Let’s reframe. This isn’t about deception; it’s about replacing fatal assumptions with ground-level truth. The Lean Startup movement is just a repackaged, ethical version of Sun Tzu’s intelligence network. “Customer discovery” is using Local Spies. A “pivot” is the result of good intelligence from a Living Spy.
But Sun Tzu saved his most powerful agent for last. He said this one spy is the key to the entire system, the pivot point on which the whole network turns.
5. The Double Agent (The Converted Asset)
Sun Tzu’s definition: Using the enemy’s own spies against them.
The Modern Equivalent: This is turning a competitor’s data-gathering tools into your own. Example: Your competitor launches a new user survey or a detailed marketing campaign for a new feature. That campaign is their spy. It’s their attempt to gather intelligence.
How to use them: Don’t just look at their ad. Analyze it. What questions are they asking in their survey? That tells you what they don’t know. What features are they pushing in their ads? That tells you what they think their weakness is. By observing your rival’s “spies,” you learn their strategy, their fears, and their blind spots.
Sun Tzu was clear: The Double Agent is the most valuable asset. Because they are paid by the enemy, they have access no one else does. They unlock the ability to recruit Local and Internal Spies, and they are the perfect channel to deliver your “Dead Spy” misinformation.”
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