“After collecting an army, comes tactical manoeuvring, than which there is nothing more difficult. The difficulty consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain.”
The hard part is converting indirect routes and bad luck into advantage; reframing is the skill.
Chapter 7 opens by naming its difficulty: after collecting an army comes tactical manoeuvring, than which there is nothing more difficult — turning the devious way into the direct, and misfortune into gain. Two conversions, not one. Sun Tzu promises no avoidance of detours and disasters; he promises they are the raw material of the chapter. The skill is alchemy applied to setbacks.
A data breach cripples a mid-size firm: churn, lawsuits, a dark quarter. Two years later that same firm is the category’s security leader — the incident rebuilt its engineering culture, and the postmortem it published became the industry’s reference document, landing it clients who chose it because of the breach. The misfortune was not overcome; it was metabolized, which is what turning means.
Turning misfortune into gain is not silver-lining rhetoric — the firm did real, expensive engineering and made real disclosures that cost real revenue first. The verse describes a conversion with inputs, not a reframe with adjectives. Leaders who "learn from everything" but change nothing have mistaken commentary for the art of deviation.