Energy

This is the fifth chapter-length entry in a series applying Sun Tzu’s Art of War to marketing and search strategy. Tactical Dispositions drew the line between being unbeatable and actually winning. This chapter picks up where that leaves off — once the position is sound, how do you actually generate the force that converts it into a result.

Sun Tzu’s fifth chapter is about shih, usually translated as energy or momentum, and it opens with an image that’s easy to skip past too quickly: managing a large force is, in principle, no different from managing a few — it’s a matter of dividing and organizing correctly. Fighting with a large army is no different from fighting with a small one — it’s a matter of formations and signals. The point he’s building toward is that scale doesn’t require a fundamentally different kind of skill. It requires the same underlying discipline, applied consistently, at whatever size the operation happens to be.

Ordinary and extraordinary

The chapter’s central idea is a pairing: the ordinary force, used to engage directly, and the extraordinary force, used to secure the actual victory. He’s specific that these aren’t fixed categories — what’s extraordinary in one moment becomes ordinary once repeated, and the combinations between the two are, in his description, as inexhaustible as the flow of a river, or the number of ways five musical notes or five colors can be combined.

This is a sharper and more useful idea than it first appears. The instinct in marketing is often to treat “the ordinary approach” and “the innovative approach” as a binary choice — either you’re doing the standard, expected thing, or you’re doing something genuinely novel. Sun Tzu’s framing suggests something different: a small number of ordinary, well-executed moves, recombined and resequenced, can produce something that functions as extraordinary, without requiring an actually unprecedented tactic. The novelty is often in the combination and timing, not in inventing something nobody has ever done. A genuinely limited set of core content formats or distribution channels, deployed with real variation in sequencing and combination, can generate what looks from the outside like constant, inventive reinvention — because the recombination itself is doing the work the individual pieces don’t have to do alone.

Momentum as a property of the whole system

Sun Tzu offers two images for energy that are worth holding onto directly. The onrush of a conquering force is like the sudden release of a pent-up flood, crashing down a steep ravine. The decisive moment is like a hawk’s strike, so precisely timed that it breaks the body of its prey. What both images share is that the force involved isn’t generated at the instant of the strike — it’s accumulated beforehand, and the strike is simply the release of energy that was already built into the position.

This connects directly back to the previous chapter’s argument that a genuinely strong position wins the way accumulated weight naturally overwhelms something lighter. Energy, in this chapter, is that same idea examined more closely: momentum isn’t a separate thing you generate at the moment of execution through cleverness or effort. It’s stored in advance, through positioning, sequencing, and timing, and the execution moment is just when it gets spent. A campaign that feels like it “suddenly” broke through usually didn’t generate that momentum in the moment it became visible — the energy was accumulating for a while beforehand, in less visible ways, and the visible breakthrough was just the release.

Order and disorder come from the same source

There’s a genuinely counterintuitive claim in this chapter: simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is simply a matter of subdivision; concealing courage under a show of timidity presupposes a reserve of latent energy; masking strength with weakness is accomplished through tactical dispositions.

The point being made is that apparent looseness or informality, when it works, is usually not actually loose — it’s a controlled effect, built on top of real underlying discipline, deployed deliberately. This maps onto something specific in content and brand voice: an informal, spontaneous-seeming tone that actually lands well is almost never genuinely improvised. It’s usually the product of real command over the material, deployed in a way that appears loose because the underlying structure is solid enough to support the appearance without actually losing coherence. The failure mode Sun Tzu is implicitly warning against is genuine disorder mistaken for the deliberate, controlled kind — informality without the discipline underneath it, which reads as sloppy rather than confident, because there’s no real reserve behind the appearance.

Blame the energy, not the individual

Sun Tzu closes with a distinction I think is genuinely underused in how marketing teams diagnose failure: the clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, not to the effort of individual men. He compares this to rolling logs or stones — on flat ground they stay still, on a slope they roll, and the shape of the object determines whether it rolls fast or slow, far or not at all. The skillful commander’s job, in his framing, is to create the conditions — the slope, the shape — such that the natural energy of the whole system produces the result, rather than relying on individual effort to force it.

This is a specific corrective against a common diagnostic mistake: when a campaign underperforms, the instinct is often to look at individual execution — did the writer do a good job, did the person managing distribution do their part — rather than at whether the overall system, the sequencing, the combination of ordinary and extraordinary moves, was actually set up to generate momentum in the first place. A talented individual working inside a badly structured system is being asked to generate energy through sheer effort that the system itself should have been supplying through its own shape. Sun Tzu’s argument is that this is both exhausting and unreliable, compared to building a system whose natural momentum does most of the work.

What this chapter asks

Practically, this argues for two things that don’t come naturally to most marketing operations. First, that a genuinely small, well-understood set of core moves, recombined deliberately rather than constantly replaced with new tactics, is often the actual source of what looks like inventive variation from the outside — chasing novelty for its own sake is usually less productive than mastering recombination of a smaller, well-chosen set. Second, that momentum should be diagnosed and built at the level of the whole system’s structure and sequencing, not extracted from individual effort after the fact. A team that feels like it’s constantly straining to generate results through sheer individual push is often missing energy that should have been built into the shape of the campaign itself, well before the moment of execution.