Overview
Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is the foundational text for Wardley's Strategy Cycle. Wardley has described reading it as a pivotal intellectual experience and structured his entire framework around Sun Tzu's five factors: moral law (purpose), earth (landscape), heaven (climate), discipline (doctrine), and commander (leadership).
Key Passages
The passages most relevant to Wardley's framework include:
Significance
The Art of War provides the intellectual skeleton on which Wardley hangs his entire framework. While Boyd provides the dynamic loop (OODA) and evolutionary economics provides the evolution model, Sun Tzu provides the categorical structure — the five elements that strategy must address. Wardley's contribution is operationalizing Sun Tzu's categories with specific tools and methods.