The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu, a high-ranking military general.

I think a lot about warfare and I read a lot of military history books. This is not because I support war, either economic or political, but because there are lessons that can be learned from war that apply to business.

I am not now going to state what these all are other than to provide two quotes from Sun Tzu which I have used in my business and which anybody will find useful.

The first: “Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.” Well, we have women engineers too, but, anyway, the issue here is not that you pour reward onto your staff but that you make them seem worthy; discipline when necessary, but hold no grudges; be lenient in letting people stay home for the sake of illness or family crisis; be very hard on those that abuse privilege; do not give them working hours which are too long and cause stress in coming to work; educate and train.

The second: “When an invading force crosses a river in its onward march, do not advance to meet it in midstream. It will be best to let half the army get across, and then deliver your attack.” In other words, when your competition is in a position where its organisation is in disarray, then try to take its business.

Enough of the quotes. The point is that Sun Tzu wrote all these some 2000 years back and he had the idea that wars would be fought on the basis of killing your opponents, which is what happens today – just with more sophisticated weapons.

But given the speed at which we have gone from hand-held calculator to smartphone, it is evident to me that the next wars will be based on electronic computer warfare, whereby the winner will be the one who convinces the opponent that fighting is just not worth it. Let us take the average business. Right now, all computer programs and files are on board by means of a server and there is very little paper record of very many documents. If somebody walks into the office and walks out with all the computers and stuff, the business will be out of business or at least in a bad space. If you are smart you will have off-site computer backup but it will still take your geeks a day or two to get it all sorted.

But look at the future, which will consist of ‘cloud computing’, or simply ‘the cloud’. This will allow you and I to wirelessly transmit and store data off site. This will eliminate the possibility of some Stumza ripping off the lifeblood of your business but it will result in your being exposed to electronic warfare against your cloud.

Let us consider this: an enemy country (which you do not know is an enemy) wants to take your country out. It can knock out satellites to mess up your cloud, jam your communication channel or jam your communication channels, but just a bit at a time. Which to do? Naturally, the enemy knocking off satellites is a poor idea, since this will alert you. Jamming all the time, the same. So the best is to, little bit by little bit, jam your communications so ultimately you will grow to accept that “there’s a problem but it is not too bad”. Then, after a time, the enemy strikes: your communication with the cloud (and everybody else) is jammed completely. Within days, the stock markets will crash (not because they will not have backup but because the brokers will not be able to buy and sell). Roads will clog up (as traffic management systems fail) and industry will stop, not being able to buy and sell freely.

What next? The country will fall into chaos, without a shot being fired. The clear answer is: do not go to the cloud since the next war will be electronic. Sun Tzu would be very proud of me.