“Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.”
Haste is a known mistake, but endless delay is worse. Sun Tzu’s point is not to rush, but that dragging things out is rarely clever — it bleeds resources and hands the initiative to the other side. Decide, then move.
Chapter 2, having spent its verses enumerating what a long war costs, pauses to name the other failure mode. Stupid haste is a known disease, Sun Tzu concedes — but cleverness has never been associated with long delays. In a chapter whose whole argument is that duration is the silent tax on everything, waiting without purpose is not caution; it is choosing to pay that tax forever.
A company "evaluates" a move for three consecutive quarters: the memo matures, the market shifts, the analysis is redone, the decision is re-deferred. The eventual entrant arrives a year later and three times the price, into a market the analysis correctly described at every point. Nothing was wrong with the assessment; the delay itself was the losing move — the one cost the spreadsheet never carried.
This is not a push into the opposite ditch — Sun Tzu condemns stupid haste in the same breath. The standard is tempo: information arrives, a decision point is set, and at that point waiting must itself be justified like any other move. Delay is sometimes right; delay that nobody has to defend is just decay with good manners.