Business and Money Tips

Top 5 Points from Sun Tzu Art of War to apply in your Business and Life (by AndyTheCoach) 1. Know people INSIDE OUT , know who they ARE, not just what they do or have. For example, I know my friend is doing emcee and singing and has a nice car. I need to know who he is as a person, including his likes and dislikes, then it will be easier for us to work together for common goals. 2. Discipline is the key to success. Discipline is not just in compliance with rules and regulations. Discipline is doing something right when no one knows, and it is hard to do the right thing 3. Flexibility is crucial for making the most of new opportunities. Flexibility means being open to many possibilities and not being fixated on your own ideas. For example, I adjusted my courses. From 1-day or 2-days, it can be adapted to half-day or even 1-2 hours zoom seminars. 4. Need to plan for both the Best and Worse-case scenarios 5. Speed is key to success. Need to cut delays and strike while the iron is hot. ...

How do you apply Sun Tzu Art of War, a 2,500-years old military classic, into modern day customer service?  Indeed many strategies can be applied, but first we must understand the essence of the Art of War, which is 2 elements: Win to Fight, not Fight to Win Win Without Fighting, not Win With Fighting Sun Tzu (or Sūn Zǐ in pinyin) was a 500 BC Chinese general, military strategist, and author of The Art of War, an immensely influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy. Many great leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan studied his work and became legendary leaders. Many corporate leaders paid thousands of dollars to attend courses to learn Sun Tzu secrets.  We believe that you too can learn master Sun Tzu secrets and apply them to your work easily.  This is because we take the essence and compile them into an 8-hour course that will leave you with just enough materials to serve your customers and lead your business to greater heights. Since ...

As we know, social media marketing is about social first and marketing second. Same for Sun Tzu Art of War: it is about art first and war later.   'Art' in Sun Tzu Art of War refers to how we do things, while 'War' here refers to winning in the business battlefield. Social media marketing is about how we do and not what we do.  For example, it is not about how nice your photo is on FaceBook but how you post your photo: do you post it with a positive or negative angle? On the surface, Social Media is a 201x thing, while Art of War belongs to 2,500 years ago. Yet they both share a common origin: the Yi Jing (or Book of Changes) written 5,000 years ago: life is about evolution. Social media is always evolving, while Sun Tzu Art of War is too evolving with the times as Sun Tzu advocates flexibility as the key winning strategy. Today I shall look at the 5 Elements of Sun Tzu Art of War and they can be applied in our Social Media Marketing.  Know Yourself Know Your...

Everyone knows today’s economy is very different from 2015 or even January 2016. Not only are the costs rising, selling prices continue their downward spiral. These factors, coupled with labour shortage and Brexit factor, make many businessmen wonder: where is the future? As we know, every crisis produces winners. We need to ensure that we are the winner and not the loser. To do that, we must adapt fast and evolve with the rapidly changing markets. This means that we need to move to higher gear: innovate fast and ramp up productivity. As we know, innovation is about strategies and tactics and productivity is about people.  We can learn from people who have done it before: people who have won numerous battles for thousands of years using a proven formula: Sun Tzu Art of War. Background information and Why Sun Tzu is powerful : Sun Tzu (or Sūn Zǐ in pinyin) was a 500 BC Chinese general and military strategist. He led his country won numerous battles against its stron...

(note: This article is adapted from my interview with the Straits Times in 2011) The Sun Tzu 5 Elements of Dao-Jiang-Tian-Di-Fa 道将天地法 as used in the office: Dao : This means you must know where and at what level you are pitching your strategy. Or simply put, know your purpose and why you do what you do. Like in sales, we teach people 'Your Why', why you are doing sales and what attracts you to your company. From here the salesperson can share why his company can help the prospect Jiang : Jiang is the leader or leadership. In the office, if everyone uses blame, excuses and denial and no one takes leadership and responsibility for office matters, you can be sure that the whole office will be on fire soon Tian:  Tian refers to the overall climate or what HR Practitioners called "Corporate Culture".  It is your way of doing things, and your  written and unwritten rules  in the office Di : Di is the ground, support and places where you can take refuge in. In the...

The number one, which is the smallest whole number, can have enormous power. One more product sold every day, one more percentage point added to your profits or revenues every week, or one more day gained from lesser work can yield astonishing amounts of improved profits for your business. Here's how we apply the power of one to our clients: 1. Just Take One Idea from our Course and Apply It Today and you'll see immediate improvements to your profits.  2. One More Try, before you give up , is often the one step that turn failures into successes 3. The smallest change that produces the biggest impact in bottom-line, which is none other than your way of thinking 4. One compay concept, where there is no fighting among departments 5. One by one, or step by step , is surely the way to do big things in a sustainable way 6. One learning a day, unabated for 21 days, will make you an expert in any subject matter 7 . One sharing , of this article, to just one person, wil...

In the current war between IS and the rest of the world, I can safely predict the losing side to be IS. This is because I learnt from Sun Tzu's Art of War that to forecast the outcome of a war between two teams, we can ask the following 8 questions: Which leader possesses greater moral influence?  Put it in another way, which leader is one that you want to follow from your conscience?  Which leader is more capable ? Which team holds more favourable conditions in climate and ground?  This may mean asking which team has better ground support and favourable external factors ? On which team are visions and instructions better communicated and implemented? Which team has superiority in its team's mind?  Sun Tzu considered the mind, not fighting tools, as the most powerful weapon On which team are the management and field staff better trained? Which team has more discipline ? Which team has better compensation, rewards and penalty systems? LEADERSHIP WI...

In his military classic "Art of War" written 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu taught us that to defeat the competition and achieve your goals, you must have foreknowledge or 先知.  Foreknowledge is not about the following: Prediction based on the past Unsubstantiated Hearsay Analogy with past events Derived from calculations Foreknowledge is about 4 things: Detailed research and analysis from people who know the competition situation in detail Knowledge of the personality and behaviour profile of people Psychology of things, why people do things in certain way Knowledge about the environment, including business climate Foreknowledge does not stop at knowing your competitors.   The most important knowledge is to know yourself.   You must know where you are strong and where you are weak so that  your weakness will not be exposed and instead positioned as strengths.    Having foreknowledge will also help us to exercise  Deception, ...