The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Coddling your soldiers and acting as if everyone were equal will ruin discipline and promote the creation of factions. Victory will forge stronger bonds than superficial friendliness, and victory comes from discipline, training, and ruthlessly high standards.

Like Sherman, do not struggle with your soldiers’ idiosyncrasies, but rather turn them into a virtue, a way to increase your potential force. Be creative with the group’s structure, keeping your mind as fluid and adaptable as the army you lead.

Wise generals set nothing in stone, always retaining the ability to reorganize their army to fit the times and their changing needs.

the way to get soldiers to work together and maintain morale is to make them feel part of a group that is fighting for a worthy cause.

The best way to motivate people is not through reason but through emotion. Humans, however, are naturally defensive, and if you begin with an appeal to their emotions—some histrionic harangue—they will see you as manipulative and will recoil.

Too many rewards will spoil your soldiers and make them take you for granted; too much punishment will destroy their morale. You need to hit the right balance.

Anger and punishment should be equally rare; instead your harshness should take the form of setting very high standards that few can reach.

Make your soldiers compete to please you. Make them struggle to see less harshness and more kindness.

That Cromwell is generally considered one of history’s great military leaders is all the more remarkable given that he learned soldiery on the job.

Recruits of character will give you a staff already open to your influence, making morale and discipline infinitely easier to attain.

As far as possible in this secular world, make battle a religious experience, an ecstatic involvement in something transcending the present.

The most important reason for both Jones’s and Latimer’s willingness to work so hard, though, was that Johnson worked still harder.

He never asked his employees to do anything he wouldn’t do himself.

He worked harder than any of his staff, and his men saw him do it;

Understand: morale is contagious, and you, as leader, set the tone. Ask for sacrifices you won’t make yourself (doing everything through assistants) and your troops grow lethargic and resentful;

Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell. COLONEL CHARLES ARDANT DU PICQ, 1821–70

“There is one thing, Gisgo, that you have not noticed,” Hannibal replied: “In all that great number of men opposite, there is not a single one whose name is Gisgo.”

Where others would harangue their soldiers with speeches, he knew that to depend on words was to be in a sorry state: words only hit the surface of a soldier, and a leader must grab his men’s hearts, make their blood boil, get into their minds, alter their moods.

Like Hannibal, you must aim indirectly at people’s emotions: get them to laugh or cry over something that seems unrelated to you or to the issue at hand. Emotions are contagious—they bring people together and make them bond.

Motivation is subtler than that. By advancing indirectly, setting up your emotional appeal, you will get inside instead of just scratching the surface.

But a few players noticed something different about Lombardi: he oozed confidence—no shouts, no demands. His tone and manner suggested that the Packers were already a winning team; they just had to live up to it.

Unlike other coaches, Lombardi explained what he was doing: installing a simpler system, based not on novelty and surprise but on efficient execution.

Lombardi, though, had no favorites; for him there were no stars.

“We were always trying to show [Lombardi] he was wrong,” commented one player. “That was his psych.”

recognized the problem right away: the team was infected with adolescent defeatism.

The leader who tries to change the group’s spirit directly—yelling, demanding, disciplining—actually plays into the teenage dynamic and reinforces the desire to rebel.

To him the National Football League teams were virtually equal in talent. The differences lay in attitude and morale:

Then, in his practices, Lombardi didn’t make demands—a defensive, whiny approach that betrays insecurity. Instead he changed the practices’ spirit, making them quiet, intense, focused, workmanlike.

Changing it is difficult; people prefer what they know, even if it doesn’t work.

Announcing intentions and making demands will leave people defensive and feeling like children.

Like Lombardi, play the wily parent. Ask more of them. Expect them to work like adults. Quietly alter the spi...

Emphasize efficiency: anybody can be efficient (it isn’t a question of talent), efficiency breeds succe...

He treated them well but never spoiled them. He appealed not to their greed but to their thirst for glory and recognition.

Promotions, rewards, and public praise were equally rare, and when they came, they were always for merit, never for some political calculation.

Learn from the master: the way to manage people is to keep them in suspense.

People who spread panic or mutiny experience a kind of madness in which they gradually lose contact with reality.

In a world that frowns on displays of overt aggression, the ability to fight defensively—to let others make the first move and then wait for their own mistakes to destroy them—will bring you untold power.

We all have limitations—our energies and skills will take us only so far. Danger comes from trying to surpass our limits.

Sometimes it is better to wait, to undermine your enemies covertly rather than hitting them straight on.

From the story of King Pyrrhus and his famous lament after the Battle of Asculum comes the expression “Pyrrhic victory,” signifying a triumph that is as good as a defeat, for it comes at too great a cost.

But Pyrrhus could not stop himself—the dream was too alluring.

Understand: the more you want the prize, the more you must compensate by examining what getting it will take. Look beyond the obvious costs and think about the intangible ones: the goodwill you may squander by waging war, the fury of the loser if you win, the time that winning may take, your debt to your allies.

Remember: history is littered with the corpses of people who ignored the costs. Save yourself unnecessary battles and live to fight another day.

Limitations are troublesome, but they are effective. If we live economically in normal times, we are prepared for times of want. To be sparing saves us from humiliation. Limitations are also indispensable in the regulation of world conditions. In nature there are fixed limits for summer and winter, day and night, and these limits give the year its meaning. In the same way, economy, by setting fixed limits upon expenditures, acts to preserve property and prevent injury to the people. THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

What made the victory possible was the application of a basic military axiom: attack their weaknesses with your strengths.

Understand: no person or group is completely either weak or strong. Every army, no matter how invincible it seems, has a weak point, a place left unprotected or undeveloped.

Meanwhile even the weakest group has something it can build on, some hidden strength. Your goal in war is not simply to amass a stockpile of weapons, to increase your firepower so you can blast your enemy away. That is wasteful, expensive to build up, and leaves you vulnerable to guerrilla-style attacks.

Going at your enemies blow by blow, strength against strength, is equally unstrategic. Instead you must f...

Abundance makes me poor. —Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17)

An animal lives within those limits: it does not try to fly higher or run faster or expend endless energy amassing a pile of food, for that would exhaust it and leave it vulnerable to attack. It simply tries to make the most of what it has.