The art of war and The thirty-six stratagems: Chinese ancient pragmatism and project management

Abstract

Since China became one of the main actors in the world economic scenario, the interest towards its exotic culture raised meaningfully. Focusing on a business perspective, one book in particular has fascinated academics, experts and businessmen of the whole world. This book is The art of war, a compendium of military techniques and rules, dense with meaning and philosophy. The international celebrity it has achieved is not at all comparable with The thirty-six stratagems’ one, even though the latest is a bright example of Chinese thought and even though its business application are widespread in China and East Asia. In this work, I will try to find the connections existing between these two books and apply them to the specific business objective of Project Management, a smaller, trendy and quite new branch of economics. In the very last part of this work, there will be some space for some examples coming from the real world, in the specific from ZTE, a Chinese multinational company making a project in Italy.