The Book of Five Rings for Executives: Musashi's Classic Book of Competitive Tactics

Used for centuries by Japanese businessmen and studied by many of Silicone Valley's warriors of today's wired world, The Book of Five Rings by samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi has provided a powerful, practical approach to achieving competitive dominance. Now, in The Book of Five Rings for Executives , Donald Krause has enriched and simplified the original material of this ancient classic of competitive tactics and strategy into a set of seven clearly defined and easily applied business principles.

Those who see the business world or the negotiating table as a battlefield frequently cite the works of ancient Chinese military expert Sun-Tzu and Italian philosopher Machiavelli. Less widely known is Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, but his seventeenth-century classic, The Book of Five Rings, outlining tactics and strategy, has similarly been applied. Krause has already adapted Sun-Tzu's The Art of War and the works of Confucius for business managers. Now he summarizes Musashi's seven principles of competitive success and shows how Japanese industry as well as such American business leaders as Donald Trump and Starbucks' Howard Schultz have used these principles to their advantage. Krause eschews several excellent literal translations of Musashi's work, suggesting that specific Japanese historical and cultural details make modern application difficult. Instead, he offers this "reinterpretation." And, though Musashi and Sun-Tzu were writing about a way of life, not how Donald Trump might swing a better real-estate deal, there are a lot of would-be Trumps out there who will ask for this book. David Rouse