The history and business of publishing throws up some anomalies. For the last 15 years, more copies of the IKEA catalogue have been printed annually than copies of the Holy Bible. Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has still to outsell Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio. And more business leaders than military generals have bought Sun Zi's Art of War.
The last-cited book first emerged 27 centuries ago, but it's become a revered business text in recent decades, as well as the all-time best-selling guide to winning on the battlefield.
'Know your enemies, know yourself,' extolled Sun Zi in his treatise. In contrast, the legendary Admiral Zheng He might have countered by saying: 'Know your collaborators, know yourself.'
Professor Hum Sin Hoon, vice-dean of undergraduate studies programme at the National University of Singapore Business School, has penned this work from the mindset of the admiral, thanks to apparently superhuman research. In a nutshell, if the admiral had written a leadership treatise, large parts would read like this.
What the book delivers is Zheng He's mellower and presumably more productive approach to leadership, which contrasts starkly with that of Sun Zi's strikingly antagonistic Art of War.
With his attachment to the collaborative paradigm, the admiral sometimes seems a much more contemporary boardroom player than 15th-century warrior - and this is one of the book's central themes: Zheng He is a win-win guy, not a zero-sum dueller.
But just who was this fellow? A towering figure in Chinese history, no less. A mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who commanded voyages from China to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and the Horn of Africa from 1405 to 1433.
