Zagula spells trouble

I recently re-read "The Art of War" because so many of my business-oriented friends were claiming that it's relevant to business. Well, that confused the hell out of me and smacked of typical business hubris. So, during this second time through the text (different translator), I noticed a perspective that I think lessens the practitioners' ability to optimally exploit resources that I didn't notice before.

Bear with me: There's a difference between engineered (teleological) systems and naturally occurring systems. The fundamental difference between these two lies in the ability to view a naturally occurring system from an infinite number of perspectives and of the viewer to _infer_ an infinite number of purposes behind any component of the system. Engineered systems, on the other hand, usually shout their purpose at you or bin themselves into a finite number of purposes to which they can be put.

"The Art of War" (in the same vein of any engineering-oriented effort) makes the simple assumption that naturally occurring systems (human socio-cultural interaction) can be managed ... guided ... collapsed down into a finite number of resolutions. Or, at the very least, it assumes that the distribution of possible outcomes can be sharpened so that the events in the tails of the distribution, while still possible, are highly unlikely to obtain.

This assumption is not treated sufficiently when Tzu proponents extoll the value of his approach. Hence, in _some_ cases, the approach is very appropriate and successful and in others it fails utterly. I would posit that if the domains where people might apply Tzu's approach were analyzed (meaning "cut up" and categorized) according to where the above assumption is warranted and where it isn't, then Tzu could be applied more predictably.

Just my $0.02.