“The Commander stands for the wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness.”
Effective command blends insight, honesty, care, nerve, and discipline; over-indexing on one warps the whole.
Fourth of the five factors, the Commander is defined as a bundle — wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage, strictness — listed in that order. The ranking is careful: judgment before trustworthiness, trust before kindness, and only then nerve and hardness. Sun Tzu’s implicit warning is that these virtues fail as a set: any one of them alone, over-developed, becomes the leader’s signature flaw.
A CTO has wisdom and courage in surplus — brilliant calls, delivered bravely in every crisis — but sincerity is thin: the team never quite learns the real reasons behind decisions, and benevolence is thinner. Result: heroic leadership over a rotating door. The company hires for his strengths and loses people to his missing virtues, exactly as the 2,500-year-old checklist predicts.
The five virtues are not a personality test to score high on evenly — no such person exists. They are an audit list for the specific command you hold: a wartime turnaround may need courage and strictness turned up; a research lab lives on wisdom and sincerity. The discipline is noticing which virtue your situation is currently starving for, and which of your strengths is quietly crowding it out.