TL;DR:
– Sources. Reference page (ceo-strategy.nl)
- Every text, scholar and case used across the eight essays, with chapter and line references you can check. Five Chinese primaries: Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi, the I Ching with its commentaries, and the Huangdi Neijing.
- Sun Tzu is drawn from Chapters 1, 5 and 10, and Chapter 10 carries the most weight: the six calamities, of which the second is 卒強吏弱，曰弛; then 非天之災，將之過也, not heaven's disaster but the general's fault; and 進不求名，退不避罪，唯人是保, the man Sun Tzu calls 國之寶也, the treasure of the state.
- Four hexagrams plus the closing pair. 61 中孚 is the ground of the whole site, 50 鼎 line four, 3 屯 and 30 離 do the specific work, and 63 既濟 with 64 未濟 frame it. The Great Treatise supplies 德薄而位尊 and 知幾其神乎, the Sequence of the Hexagrams supplies 物不可窮也, and Su Zhe is the one commentator quoted for interpretation rather than for variants.
- Western sources: Frank Jackson, Nagel and Chalmers on the gap between description and contact; Tetlock's 284 experts and 28,000 forecasts used against 前識; John of the Cross on guides who mishandle the passage; tanha from the Second Noble Truth; nunchi as second nature. Cases are Desert Storm, Morgenthau against Marshall, Chernobyl and Tōhoku, Enron and Wells Fargo, all settled and documented.
- Deliberately absent: no Clausewitz, no Machiavelli, no Porter, no Drucker, no consultancy framework anywhere on the site. The Western strategic canon is largely an analytical tradition and the claim here is that analysis belongs second, so importing it to argue the point would concede the point. Not scholarship, not coaching, not spiritual work.
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Sources of information
FAQ & Sources
Where all of this comes from
Every text, scholar and case used across the eight pages, with references you can check.
Reference · CEO-Strategy.nl
The Chinese sources
Which texts does this site actually use?
Five: Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi, the I Ching together with its commentaries, and the Huangdi Neijing. Outside the Chinese material the site draws on the Buddha's Second Noble Truth, the Delphic maxim, Korean nunchi, analytic philosophy of mind, and John of the Cross. Nothing else. Where the argument depends on a character, the Chinese is given in the original.
Which parts of Sun Tzu?
Chapter 1 for the five constant factors, and for 地, di, earth, which Part III argues means far more than terrain. Chapter 5 for 勢 and for the line Part I builds on, that the expert seeks victory from the situation rather than demanding it from his men. Chapter 10 carries the most weight, in Part VII: the six calamities, of which the second is 卒強吏弱，曰弛, the men strong and the officers weak; 非天之災，將之過也, not heaven's disaster but the general's fault; and 進不求名，退不避罪，唯人是保, the man who advances without seeking the name, whom Sun Tzu calls 國之寶也, the treasure of the state.
What is shì, and why refuse the word "calculation"?
勢 is the potential energy in a situation, the direction a river wants to run, the weight gathering on one side. Translators reach for "calculation" and "assessment" because the word has no clean English equivalent, and Western strategy inherited the error. The general perceives shì. He does not compute it. Part I is the whole argument, and Part IV extends it to shì as second nature rather than technique.
Is this Taoism?
The Tao Te Ching appears in three chapters. Chapter 1 in Part VII, for the gap between having every name and having the thing. Chapter 26 in Part VII, for weight: 重為輕根, heavy is the root of light. Chapter 38 in full, Chinese and English, on Part VI. 自然 ziran and 無為 wu-wei carry Part IV.
Part VII then refuses a common reading of the same book. Chapters 47 and 48, taken alone, appear to license the leader who waits for vision to arrive. The site argues they do not survive contact with the rest of the tradition.
Which Zhuangzi, and why?
Two craftsmen. Cook Ding, from Chapter 3, who has been cutting oxen for nineteen years and has taken apart several thousand of them. The wheelwright Pian, from Chapter 13, who is seventy years old, cannot transmit his skill to his own son, and tells Duke Huan that the books of the sages are the dregs of dead men. Both appear in Parts VII and VIII, and both do the same job: every Taoist illustration of wu-wei is a craftsman with decades of contact, which closes the door on wu-wei as a synonym for receptivity.
Pian is also the closest thing in any tradition to Frank Jackson's Mary, told from inside the workshop rather than the laboratory.
Which hexagrams?
Four, plus the pair at the end.
Hexagram 61, 中孚, Inner Truth, is the ground of the whole site and appears in Parts IV, V, VII and VIII. Hexagram 50, 鼎, the Cauldron, specifically the fourth line, in Part VII. Hexagram 3, 屯, and Hexagram 30, 離, in Part VIII. Hexagrams 63 and 64, 既濟 and 未濟, are the frame Part VII and Part VIII both rest on: the only hexagram where all six lines sit correctly is the one whose judgement reads 初吉終亂, good fortune at the beginning and disorder at the end.
What is the Great Treatise?
The 繫辭傳, Xici, one of the Ten Wings appended to the I Ching. Part VII uses its comment on Hexagram 50 line four, 德薄而位尊，知小而謀大，力小而任重，鮮不及矣, virtue thin and position exalted, few such escape. It also uses the passage two verses later, 知幾其神乎, on perceiving the incipient stirring before it becomes an event.
Part VIII uses the 序卦傳, the Sequence of the Hexagrams, on why Hexagram 3 is the first thing that has to live, and on why the Book ends where it does: 物不可窮也, things cannot be exhausted.
Which commentators?
Su Zhe 蘇轍 on Tao Te Ching 26, quoted in Part VII: 君輕則臣知其不足, if the ruler is light, the ministers know he is insufficient. Beyond that the classical commentaries are used for textual variants rather than for interpretation. Part VII notes, for instance, that the closing line of Chapter 26 is transmitted as 輕則失本, 輕則失根 and 輕則失臣 in different editions, and says which reading it is using and why.
Why the Huangdi Neijing on a strategy site?
Because Part VII names Qi and Shen as the chief executive's real portfolio, and those terms need a source. From 素問·寶命全形論: 凡刺之真，必先治神, in all needling the true thing is to regulate the spirit first, and the description of the practitioner as 如臨深淵，手如握虎，神無營於眾物, at the edge of an abyss, the hand as though holding a tiger, the spirit not busied with the multitude of things. From 素問·金匱真言論, used in Part VIII: 夫精者，身之本也, essence is the root of the body, and 非其人勿教，非其真勿授.
The Neijing is used as a description of an operator working under load. It is not used as medicine and nothing on this site is medical advice.
What is Neidan, and is this site practising it?
內丹, internal alchemy. Its refinement sequence is 精化氣，氣化神, essence into energy, energy into spirit. It is deliberate, it is slow, and it presupposes someone doing the work.
No, the site is not practising it, and the word appears in none of the essays. It matters here for one reason: it names the direction Qi and Shen arrive from, which is why Part VIII places 精, jing, beneath both of them as the entry condition. A man with no substance has nothing to refine.
Neidan and the Neijing describe different mechanisms. Why does the distinction matter?
Because collapsing them produces a claim that is both false and harmful.
The Neijing describes an account. 正氣存內，邪不可干: when upright qi is held within, what is pathogenic cannot get in. Depleted, it gets in. Nothing is being taught and nobody is being corrected. The bill arrives, and it arrives whether or not the person understands anything about why.
Neidan describes refinement, which is deliberate, takes years, and requires a practitioner.
So a collapse is the ledger. Whatever a person builds afterwards is the work. Anyone who tells you the illness was the treatment has merged two mechanisms that have nothing to do with each other, and has turned an accounting event into a lesson it never contained.
Is illness part of this work?
No. Nothing here claims that pressure on a leader produces insight through the body, and nothing here is medical advice. Depletion runs for years before it becomes visible, and it is not caused by looking at your own business honestly. Part VIII states the boundary in plain terms: if what is happening is clinical, it belongs with a doctor, and saying so is not a way of getting rid of you.
Why do these terms appear here and not in the essays?
Deliberately. A front page or an essay that has to explain its apparatus before the reader recognises himself turns the first encounter into a thinking exercise, which is the condition the whole site is written against. The mechanism belongs in the essays. The machinery belongs on this page, where anyone who wants it can find it.
Why keep the Chinese?
Because the argument usually lives in a character the translation drops. 薄, thin, connects three separate pages. 華 is not "ornamental" but hypocritical, and Part VI turns on that annotation. 幾 is the same character in 知幾, knowing the seed, and in 月幾望, the moon nearly full. None of that survives an English-only reading.
The Western sources
Which philosophers, and why philosophy of mind on a strategy site?
Frank Jackson's Mary's Room, Thomas Nagel's 1974 paper, and David Chalmers, all in Part VII. The thought experiment gives the cleanest available statement of the gap between an exhaustive description of a business and the experience of running one.
Nagel matters for a second reason. He declined to argue from the gap to a conclusion about what fills it, and Part VII uses that restraint against the executive who notices strategy is not a document and concludes it must therefore be a kind of receptivity.
Where do the Tetlock numbers come from?
Philip Tetlock's forecasting research, running from 1984 to 2003: 284 experts producing roughly 28,000 forecasts, with results only slightly better than chance and usually beaten by simple extrapolation. The figures follow Tetlock's own account of the study. Part VI uses them against 前識, foreknowledge, which Chapter 38 calls the flower of Tao and the beginning of ignorance.
Why John of the Cross?
Part VIII, and not for the mysticism. Two things are useful. His description of the passage in which the methods that always worked stop working, and the inability itself is the sign rather than the symptom. And his anger, sharper than anything he writes about the night itself, at directors who fail to recognise the passage and push the person back into the old method harder.
Why the Buddha?
The Second Noble Truth, and specifically tanha, craving, understood as the demand that reality be other than it is. Parts IV and V use it as the mechanism by which a leader's alignment breaks: the market is not behaving as modelled, something in him opposes this, and he protects the plan against the reality instead of updating the plan from it.
Why nunchi?
눈치, Korean, the capacity to read what is unspoken. Part IV distinguishes nunchi as a social technique, which still has a gap between perception and response, from nunchi as second nature, which has none.
Which cases are used, and are they checkable?
Desert Storm 1991 and Schwarzkopf's Left Hook, in Parts I and IV. The Morgenthau Plan against the Marshall Plan, in Part II. Chernobyl 1986 and the 2011 Tōhoku response, in Part III. Enron's sixty-four page Code of Ethics of July 2000 and its four values, and Wells Fargo's Vision and Values booklet, in Part VI. All are documented and all are settled. No live litigation is discussed and no private individual is named.
Which strategists are deliberately absent?
There is no Clausewitz, no Machiavelli, no Porter, no Drucker, no Collins, and no consultancy framework anywhere on this site. That is a choice rather than an oversight. The Western strategic canon is largely an analytical tradition, and the argument here is that analysis belongs second. Bringing in the canon to make the point would concede the point.
Method and limits
Are you a sinologist?
No. This is not scholarship and not a translation project. The texts are here because they describe the condition of a leader more accurately than the management literature does, and because they were written by people who watched rulers fail at close range. Where a reading is contested, the page says so and gives the variants.
Is this executive coaching, or spiritual work?
Neither. Part VII argues at length against the move from "analysis is insufficient" to "therefore strategy is receptivity", which is the error most likely to be read into a site that quotes the I Ching. Part VIII states the boundary with clinical care in plain terms.
Where should I start?
At the beginning, in order. Parts I to III describe a process. Parts IV to VII describe the condition of the leader and of the organisation that the process depends on. Part VIII is where the sequence lands, and describes what happens when a chief executive makes contact.