The Art Of War And Sales

Via the Conglomerate just came across a recent Dan Gross piece on a subject near and dear:

Why are businesspeople so enamored of Chinese quotations? And is there some secret little red book of proverbs that CEOs pass around in samizdat form at Bohemian Grove or Augusta National?

There are several reasons for the executive class's linguistic Chinoiserie.

Just as China is an untapped market for American consumer-product companies, it's an untapped resource for American purveyors of business inspiration. In the 1990s and the early part of this decade, books like Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers and Sun Tzu and the Art of Business did well. The latter helped create an ongoing franchise for its author Mark McNeilly to explain the works of the Chinese writer to American middle managers.

Today, many executives quote Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu for the same reason they started exchanging their bespoke suits for business-casual khakis: They have to show that they're with it. China represents the future and is the locus of immense growth. Casually tossing Chinese proverbs into conversation shows that you're down with the latest trends, even if you haven't (yet) relocated your manufacturing capacity to Shenzhen.

So Gross thinks it has to do with China being cool, or the next big thing.  It's also that being able to drop a Chinese proverb -- ideally philosophical in some manner -- is a signal that one's business practice isn't just about money.   That one not only looks out for themselves and investors, but to the world, and to deep spiritual. It's not about being fat, happy and counting cash in a top hat -- it's all about something deeper.  It's something that can only be tapped at 4 AM yoga sessions before 10 mile runs before morning calls with contacts across the globe.

Gross also relates this amusing observation, from a recent corporate pow-wow in Aspen:

In Aspen, there was one session that was entirely free of Chinese proverbs: a panel at which Chinese, Japanese, and Western experts talked about China's economy and global imbalances. When I asked David Li if Chinese businesspeople use Chinese proverbs at meetings, he chuckled. "No. If they did it too much, it would seem like a cliché."

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