Tian Dan was about to attack the Di tribe, and went to visit Master Lu Zhong. Master Lu Zhong said, "General, if you attack Di, you will not be able to conquer it." Tian Dan said, "With a small territory of merely five li within the inner walls and seven li beyond the outer walls, I led broken and remnant soldiers and defeated Yan, which possessed ten thousand chariots, and recovered the lost lands of Qi. Why, then, should I fail to conquer Di?" He mounted his carriage without taking leave and departed. Subsequently, he went to attack Di, but after three months, he still had not conquered it. Tian Dan then became fearful and went to ask Master Lu Zhong, saying, "Sir, you said I would not conquer Di—please let me hear your reasoning." Master Lu Zhong said, "When the general was at Jimo, when seated, you wove straw baskets; when standing, you held a spade, urging the soldiers on, saying: 'There is nowhere left to go! The ancestral temples are destroyed! Our souls are lost! Where can we return to?' At that time, the general had the resolve to die, and the soldiers had no thought of survival. Hearing these words, there was none who did not wipe away tears and raise their arms, eager to fight—this was the reason you could defeat Yan. But now, to the east, you have the revenues of Ye Yi; to the west, you have the pleasures of the Zi River. A golden belt hangs at your waist, and you gallop freely between the Zi and Mian rivers. You possess the joys of living, yet lack the resolve to die—therefore, you cannot prevail." Tian Dan said, "I have such thoughts within me—you, sir, already knew them." The next day, he stirred his spirit, inspected the city walls, stood where arrows and stones fell together, and seized the drumsticks to beat the drum. The Di people were then conquered.
💡 商战启示录
The success and failure of Tian Dan's campaign against Di reveals the deep laws of corporate leadership and crisis awareness. When he first broke the Yan state, Tian Dan found himself in desperate straits, sharing hardships with his soldiers, and used a "heart of death" to ignite team morale—much like a startup in times of scarce resources, where a founder who leads by example and is driven by vision can unite the team and unleash astonishing fighting power. Yet when attacking Di, Tian Dan, having achieved fame and glory, reveled in the pleasures of his fiefdom and grew complacent; the leadership's "joy of life" dulled their ambition, and the team lost its sense of urgency, causing performance to decline. In modern business, many enterprises, such as Nokia, dominated the era of feature phones, yet because they rested on their market position and lacked the "heart of death" for self-renewal, they rapidly declined amid the wave of smartphones. Conversely, Huawei's Ren Zhengfei has always emphasized that "the next to fall may be Huawei," keeping the organization vigilant through crisis management and sustaining R&D investment, thus standing firm in the communications field. Lu Zhongzi's observation that "having the joy of life but no heart of death" is the root of failure parallels the "big company disease" after success: bureaucratization and complacency. Business leaders must guard against the inertia that success breeds and proactively cultivate a culture of "thriving in adversity," as Amazon's Jeff Bezos adheres to the "Day 1" philosophy, treating every day as the first day of a startup and maintaining hunger. Tian Dan ultimately "hardened his spirit and circled the city, standing amid arrows and stones," returning to the front lines and leading by example before turning the tide of battle. This admonishes managers that no matter how large the enterprise, leaders must maintain direct contact with the market and rekindle entrepreneurial passion, lest they fall into the predicament of "failing to take Di."