For those who don’t know who Sun Tzu was, he was the author of The Art of War, one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy. It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu suggested the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment.
He is attributed with the well-known phrase “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” That is what makes him an idiot.
In the advertising industry, we network with friends who are also enemies. Enemies in that we often do battle for the same business, traditionally in RFPs (oh, RFPs for the most part suck, but that’s another post). At my agency, we’ve always had a policy not to go after an other local agency’s business. We started the strategy because when we were small, we felt it was best not to poke the sleeping giant, but as we grew with experience, team size, billing and roster of clients, we learned somewhere along the way to respect the relationships others have worked so hard to forge and that we would be crossing paths with those same people at local Chambers, mixers and industry events. We always wanted to hold our heads high.
Recently, in the downturn economy, I’ve noticed a lot more pilfering of each other’s (local agencies) accounts. How’d they know, for the most part, that the account was in play?…because you blabbed. You kept close what you thought was a friend but turned out to be an enemy. You, in industry chit chat, were asked how things were going with X, and you stupidly said “negative, negative, negative” and your “friend” thought is was an opportunity for them, sometimes a needed opportunity - “needed” in that they needed to get the business or their crummy little agency from out of market who dropped an office in our home town would have closed, or something like that.
Anyway, back to the point – look, keep your friends close, but know who your friends are and keep your family and faith closer. Avoid your enemies, even the secret agent ones.
