A Modern Application For When Things Don’t Go Our Way

James Gimian
and
Barry Boyce

Presented by the Georgetown University, Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS).

November 18, 2009
Reed Alumni House
3601 O Street NW
(Brick House with White Pillars)
Washington, DC

Open to the public.

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm

Chaos, conflict, and the escalation of complex challenges seem to define our experience today, whether we’re an army commander, policy maker, business leader, or just trying to manage our world. Nowhere is this experience more evident than in the security community. Because the ordinary approaches often don’t work when things are complex, and because the stakes are so high nowadays, we need other skills and tools to rely on when things don’t go our way.

For 2500 years Sun Tzu’s Art of War has provided leaders with skillful strategies for working with complex challenging situations, conflict, and war. A model of nonlinear, synthetic thinking, this ancient text offers key lessons that are strikingly modern: the central importance of knowledge, seeing the whole system, and how networks can be managed to achieve objectives.

James Gimian and Barry Boyce have consulted and taught on how to apply the strategies in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in a wide variety of settings over the past 25 years. They are authors of The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict-Strategies from the Art of War (2008), and produced a critically acclaimed and best-selling translation of The Art of War: The Denma Translation, currently used in the Naval and Air Force War Colleges. Gimian and Boyce are also longtime publishing and writing professionals, currently serving as publisher (Gimian) and senior editor (Boyce) of the Shambhala Sun, North America’s leading Buddhist-inspired magazine.

Join us for an exploration of strategies from Sun Tzu’s Art of War for engaging complex problems in our increasingly challenging world.

If you’re going, please RSVP

[Comment — The Rules of Victory is a superb book.  Not easy reading, but I’d put it on a par with The Japanese Art of War (by Thomas Cleary — and one of Boyd’s favorites) in importance for reaching a deeper understanding of Boyd’s strategic concepts.]