User:Garygagliardi
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My name is Gary Gagliardi. While building one of the fastest-growing companies in America (FourGen Software, one of the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America in both 1992 and 1993), I became recognized for our company's practical use of Sun Tzu's The Art of War in business. This started because I wrote an adaptation of Sun Tzu's work for our companies salespeople called The Art of Sales to help them understand how I had used these principles in sales and market in the decade before starting the company. Because of our company's success in using these ideas, several of our corporate customers (Motorola, AT&T, and others) started asking me to speak in Sun Tzu at their company and customer events. This led to magazines such as PCWeek, writing articles about me, our company, and our use of The Art of War and more speaking engagements at corporate and industry events.
When I sold my software company in 1997, large organizations continued inviting me to speak on Sun Tzu at events around the world. As a life-long language student, I was very unhappy with existing English translations of Sun Tzu, which not only contradicted each other but were internaly inconsisten, so I began making a serious study <The Art of War in its original Chinese. Bringing my background of computer science and history of successfully using Sun Tzu's ideas in practical ways, I read the Chinese very differently than most translators. What impressed me was the systematic and mathematical nature of Sun Tzu's treatise. The conceptual (as opposed to liguistic) nature of ancient Chinese has more in common with mathematics and science that it does with everyday spoken language. This realization lead to my spending several years developing my new award-winning translation of Sun Tzu, one which showed the original Chinese and explained the conceptual nature of its characters, This work, called The Art of War Plus the Ancient Chinese Revealed in 1999. This work was awarded the Independent Publishers Award the following year for the Best Multicultural Book of the Year. This book is now used around the world for different language translations.
In conjunction with training organizations that range from the World Bank to Nokia in using Sun Tzu's formulas for strategic success, I then developed a series of fifteen book explaining and adapting Sun Tzu's methods. Ten of these books have won book award recognition as among the best books in their category. In just the last few years, these books have won awards in seven different nonfiction categories from three different book award groups, the Ben Franklin Awards, Independent Publisher's Awards, and Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards.
Because of competitive and military strategy is often relevant to a wide range of issues in the news, I have appeared on hundreds of television and especially radio shows as a guest to explain the implications of various strategic moves regarding politics and terrorism.
As the interest in studying Sun Tzu's methods from a more scientific approach spread, I developed an on-line training site, called Sun Tzu's Strategy School, and a worldwide organization of trainers licensed to use my materials and training methods. This organization is called the Science of Strategy Institute.
