War, Power, Strategy

January 24, 2006
Robert Greene

War is seemingly everywhere around us, and not just the war in Iraq. There are culture wars, internet wars, business wars, nasty political wars. This all reflects something strange and new happening in society—a heightened level of conflict up and down the line, as more and more individuals are drawn into and involved in power struggles. It is a confusing and complicated battlefield for us all. The only way to really navigate this new world order is through a solid understanding of strategy, but there is much confusion and many misconceptions about this subject.

Strategy is not a prescription for doing this or that in certain situations, but rather a philosophy, a way of looking at the world, a heightened form of rationality and consciousness. The most developed form of strategy comes from warfare, where for thousand of years extremely sound principles on how to handle conflict and competition have been conceived, tested and retested on the battlefield.

Some of these principles include the supreme importance of mobility in thought and action, looking at the world through your rivals’ eyes, crafting plans that are detailed yet flexible, always taking the line of least expectation and least resistance. The art of war itself, as defined by Sun-tzu, is to win with minimum bloodshed and violence, an ideal that is rarely lived up to in war, but one that is of great value to study nonetheless. The apex is Grand Strategy, a philosophical approach to life which always aims at the most rational and far reaching solution to any problem.

The knowledge contained in the art of war has for too long been relegated to elites and seen as an arcane subject. The premise of The 33 Strategies of War is that military strategy has incredible relevance to all kinds of everyday situations, problems, conflicts. The 33 Strategies is steeped in the philosophy of Sun-tzu, the tenets of grand strategy, and the practical wisdom contained in the military arts. It is an attempt to make the ideas and experiences of the greatest strategists in history—Napoleon, Hannibal, Queen Elizabeth I, T.E. Lawrence, Musashi, to name a few—as applicable and useful to your life as possible. Its goal is to make everyone his or her own general and master strategist.

Speaker Details

Robert Greene is the author of the bestselling The 48 Laws of Power (1998: translated into 18 languages, over a million copies sold worldwide), The Art of Seduction (2001) and The 33 Strategies of War (2006), all published by Viking/Penguin. He has studied at UC Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, and NYU, and has a degree in Classics and Comparative Literature. Greene has worked as a journalist, a screenwriter/story developer, a consultant for the culture & media school Fabrica (Treviso, Italy), and as a consultant for various worldwide businesses on matters relating to power and strategy. He has lived in London, Paris, and Barcelona, among other cities, and speaks five languages. He is an avid, lifelong student of Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, Raymond Chandler and Choderlos de Laclos, author of Dangerous Liaisons. Mr. Greene lives in Hollywood, where he was also born and raised.