“The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success.”
Character and discipline are not soft extras; they are the levers that let a leader shape results.
Chapter 4 closes its first movement by returning to Chapter 1’s first and fifth factors: the consummate leader cultivates the moral law and strictly adheres to method and discipline, and thus controls success. The chapter that began with invulnerability ends it by naming its materials — alignment above, systems below. Between those two, the leader holds the levers; everything else in war is weather.
A restaurant group’s third location fails like the first two — the same staff churn, the same food-cost drift, the same "bad market." The owner who turns it around stops blaming geography and starts cultivating: a purpose the kitchens actually repeat back to him, and a discipline of weekly numbers every manager runs identically. Locations four through nine open into the same "bad markets" and do not fail. Same cuisine, same city — different moral law and method.
Control of success is not guaranteed success — Sun Tzu spends chapters on enemy, terrain, and fortune. The verse says virtue and method are the levers you actually hold, the difference between an organization whose failures teach it and one whose failures repeat. Character without system is charisma on a leaking hull; system without shared belief is bureaucracy waiting to be deserted.