Management strategies: The Art of War II (stratagem and tactics; energy)

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Estrategias de gerencia: El Arte de la Guerra II - Sun Tzu - (estrategia y táctica; energía).

Confident on your capacity; never afraid of the competitors: All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved - Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu is a Chinese general to whom a collection of essays known as The Art of War is attributed to. For professionals in my field, to learn about management strategies is certainly useful, because the success of our enterprises largely depend on how good our team is. At universities, training on that field (management) is scarce; that is why I decided to share some words on such topic through the essays of General Tzu. At this time, I write some comments on the second part of the book: attack, defense and alternative methods. My expectation is that after reading the brief interpretation I provide, you will feel encouraged to give your own interpretation to Tzu´s work.. 

The Art of War Part I: Workforce management (planning and implementation stages)

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El arte de la guerra Parte I: Manejo del personal (etapas de planificación e implementación)

Besides the technical knowledge, the success of a project depends on how good the workforce is, or more properly, on how smart the manager of the workforce is. Usually, to manage a group of engineers is not too difficult, because both the manager and the personnel may have similar backgrounds. A small problem may arise when such workforce has different interests and backgrounds. When I returned to my home country, it was noticeable how different was the working atmosphere. Then, browsing on the Internet I found a book that for long I wanted to read. The title is "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. Let me share some words of this book with you, and let´s turn them into my concern.

Concepts: Entrepreneur

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Published in La Razon, May 2006.

Conceptos: Emprendedor
 
Entrepreneur.- A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture. From the old French entrependre, to undertake,  (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company).

According to the Wikipedia (sorry for citing this source), during the XVIII´s this term was applied to persons in charge of building roads, bridges, and also to architects. Civil Engineers and engineers in general are entrepreneurs by nature. But, is our spirit aware of that? or, have we merely become survivors? A short discussion with my cousin (you will find interesting material in his blog) reminded me that those are some of the questions that took me to pursue the graduate school in Tohoku.

In summary, defining the term entrepreneur using the three illustrations above, the term entrepreneurship is key in graduate programmes, but beyond that, the term entrepreneurship (difficult to me to pronounce) establishes the difference between the developed and the developing world, and magically holds the secret to bridge the apparently wide gap.