Tian Dan was about to attack the Di people, and went to visit Master Luzhong. Master Luzhong said, "General, if you attack Di, you will not take it." Tian Dan said, "I once held an inner city of five li and an outer city of seven li, leading the remnant soldiers after defeat, and defeated the state of Yan with its ten thousand chariots, recovering the lost territories of Qi. Now if I attack Di and cannot take it, why is that?" With that, he mounted his carriage and left without taking leave, then proceeded to attack Di. For three consecutive months, he could not conquer it. The children of Qi sang a nursery rhyme: "The great cap is like a winnowing basket, the long sword props up the chin; attacking Di we cannot take it, dead bones pile into little hills." Only then did Tian Dan become afraid, and went to ask Master Luzhong, saying, "Sir, you said I could not take Di—please let me hear your reasoning." Master Luzhong said, "When you were at Jimo, General, you sat and wove straw baskets, stood and wielded a spade, and urged your soldiers on, saying: 'There is no place left to go! The ancestral temples are destroyed! Our very souls are lost! Where else can we return to!' At that time, you had a heart resolved on death, and your soldiers had no thought of survival. Hearing such words, none failed to shed tears and raise their arms, longing for a fight to the death—this is why you could defeat Yan. But now, General, you have the revenues of Yi to the east, and the pleasures of the Zi River to the west; with a golden belt at your waist, you gallop between the Zi and Mian rivers, savoring only the joy of living, yet lacking the resolve to die. Therefore you cannot prevail." Tian Dan said, "I have such a heart—you, sir, already know it." The next day, he roused his spirits and inspected the city walls, standing where arrows and stones fell together, personally seizing the drumsticks to sound the drum, and only then were the Di people conquered.
💡 商战启示录
Tian Dan's failure and subsequent success in attacking Di reveals the decisive impact of a leader's shifting mindset on organizational performance at different stages. In the early days of entrepreneurship, leaders often resemble Tian Dan at Jimo—scarce in resources, under immense survival pressure—yet it is precisely this "heart of the desperate" that ignites team cohesion and fighting spirit, enabling the weak to overcome the strong. Huawei, for instance, rose through the cracks between telecommunications giants in its early years, driven by a "wolf culture" and the crisis awareness of all-employee shareholding. However, once a company achieves staged success, leaders are prone to slipping into the comfort zone of "the joy of living, without the heart to die," content with existing market share and profits, blind to external threats and internal inertia, leading to organizational rigidity and waning innovation. A classic case is Nokia: after dominating the feature-phone era, its executives became entranced by their established success model, reacting sluggishly to the smartphone revolution, and were ultimately overthrown by Apple and the Android camp. The key to Lu Zhongzi's awakening of Tian Dan lies in the leader's imperative to lead by example, returning to the "front line" to feel the brutality of the market and the striving state of employees. In modern business, this corresponds to strategies of "founder's return" or "management immersion." When Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft, he drove cultural transformation, championing a "growth mindset," personally delving into R&D and customer front lines, reshaping the company's sense of crisis and innovative drive, and ultimately leading Microsoft back to the pinnacle of market value. Thus, the essence of strategic wisdom in business warfare is this: leaders must perpetually maintain a mindset of "trembling with caution, as if treading on thin ice," converting past successes into momentum for continuous transformation, rather than a cushion for complacency.