“Here, read this instead of watching TV”, directed my wife as she thrust a red and black-bound book into my lap. The Art of War (1), read the cover. I immediately recognized it as one of the many books she had hauled along with her when she moved into my apartment back in 2017. It wasn’t the first time she tried to turn me on to this book, but, I admit, the thought of reading some dusty ancient philosophy was putting me to sleep. So, I procrastinated picking it up, even after I started Mandarin language studies in 2018 and visited China for the first time in 2019. One rainy evening in Vancouver, I was already bored (and wanted to go to sleep anyway), so I picked it up and started reading.
Written 2500 years ago, The Art of War originally served as a military treatise addressing a host of skills related to military strategy and tactics. Today, a quick internet search revealed that its insights have been revived and repurposed to find new applications in the world of business. The chapter, and specifically a paragraph, that I would like to discuss is on the subject of Momentum.
“The skilled general seeks combined momentum and does not rely on individual prowess; he knows how to choose his men for maximum combined effect. This combined effect in battle has the power of rolling logs and boulders. It is the nature of logs and boulders to remain still level ground, but to roll down a slope; they will come quickly to a halt if they have squared-off sides, but keep rolling if they are round. The momentum of skilled warriors is like a round boulder tumbling down a thousand-foot mountain. This is what I have to say on momentum.”
What is momentum in business?
Business success is generally defined by current or future profits (2). A company’s ability to generate profits is tied to its ability to win new, and retain existing, customers. Having more customers usually means you can generate greater profits that can then be reinvested to grow the business (by, for example, hiring more and better talent, paying higher salaries, increasing marketing budgets, investing more in research and development, and much more). This “flywheel” is how every ambitious business builds momentum. It is the boulder that is tumbling down the mountain gaining more speed and kinetic energy.
So how do you tumble a boulder?
1. You need skilled warriors
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu describes the momentum of a combination of skilled warriors in battle as a boulder tumbling down a mountain.
Takeaway: One of the most important factors contributing to gaining momentum in business is the people you have on your team (i.e. the skilled warriors). The people you bring into your company do not have to possess the same skill sets, but they must be skilled in their own right. Building a successful business truly does “take a village”.
Sun Tsu does not directly discuss what he considers to be a “skilled warrior” in this passage, but I will share my thoughts on what attributes make up a skilled warrior in business. Depending on the industry, company size, and stage in the company lifecycle, the skill of people you need on your team may vary. However, there are certain characteristics that are universally desirable that one should look for when building a team (these by no means are exhaustive):
Curious individuals who are passionate about solving problems.
Individuals who go beyond what they are asked to do -- they go out of their way to find ways to solve problems they know exist, without having to explicitly be told to do so. I would call those people “hungry”.
Hard-working individuals who don’t need to be asked to work hard -- they work hard because they don’t see it done any other way.
People who thrive working in a team (see point 2).
2. You need a maximum combined effect
Sun Tsu explains that to gain momentum, a good general does not rely on the individual prowess of each warrior, but rather recognizes that it is the combined effect of skilled warriors that has the power of a rolling boulder. However, not all boulders are made the same -- their shape matters. Trying to tumble a boulder with squared-off sides is far more difficult than a round one: the former will achieve less momentum.
Takeaway: Having the most talented individuals on your team does not guarantee success -- how you put your team together and how your team works together matters even more. Getting many people to work as a unit is arguably the hardest part of building a company. It is an art, not science. A group of talented individuals assembled and working together well, has the force of a round boulder crashing down a mountain.
The author does not share specific strategies on how to achieve the “combined effect”, but in my experience, this involves:
Finding people who empower and lift up people around them.
Hiring people who understand that the success of a team is directly linked to their own success.
Committing extensive resources to the integration of new people into the team (building a great onboarding program, guiding new people through the organization, and helping them form new relationships).
3. You need a mountain
Again, this isn’t something that is discussed in The Art of War but I think is an important idea to keep in mind -- for a boulder to gain momentum you need a mountain. It needs a runway that is not only long, but also steep.
There is a reason why small businesses are relatively easy to start but so hard to grow. They often miss one critical element -- a potential for scale. This potential for scale is directly linked to the magnitude of the problem they are looking to solve. It is easier to gain momentum solving bigger problems because solving these problems yields high returns. Therefore, businesses need to pick the largest problem they can solve given the maximum amount of human, economic, social, and other forms of capital they can reasonably accumulate.
Having a great team and product is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to building a successful business. To gain substantial momentum in business, one must operate in a large and/or rapidly expanding market, in addition to operating along the industry trends, not against them (for example, it will be hard to build a successful newspaper business now). In the example of StackAdapt, a company I co-founded, we benefited from many trends such as technology-based buying of advertising (programmatic advertising), wide adoption of machine learning and AI to power decision making, growing use of mobile phones, cord-cutting in favour of Internet-connected TV devices, and so many more. And we are doing it in a massive advertising industry that is growing and also rapidly turning digital. We anticipated some of these trends when we started the company, but many opportunities emerged years later and we were able to take advantage of them.
Your market is the length of the mountain’s slope and the magnitude of the problem you are solving is the incline.
Conclusion
When tumbling boulders down a mountain, it is the round boulder that gains the most momentum. When building businesses, it is the businesses that have greater momentum that have a higher chance of success. To increase a business’ momentum one should:
Win and keep world-class talent.
Pick people who make your unit stronger.
Build for or invent the future.
This is what I have to say on momentum.
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Notes:
The Art of War by Sun Tsu. First published in 2011 by Amber Books Ltd. Translator: James Trapp.
There are other important dimensions of a successful company, such as great company culture or its philanthropic work, but one could argue those are done primarily to increase employee and customer retention which in turn should lead to higher profits.
Thanks to Anneke Bruinsma-Findlay for tirelessly reading drafts of this article.