“Over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.”
Excessive protectiveness weakens command and invites trouble; care must be paired with resolve.
Chapter 8’s fourth fault is the most counterintuitive in the catalogue: over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble. The same book that told the general to regard soldiers as beloved sons now lists caring too much as a command fault. The reconciliation is scope: love of the troops serves the mission, and when care starts driving operational decisions, the beloved army becomes the instrument of its own encirclement.
A manager cannot rotate anyone off the crisis account because "they’d take it as rejection." Cannot hold the performance bar because "the team has been through a lot." Cannot sunset the legacy product because "the two maintainers love it." Two years of accumulated mercy later, the team is smaller (layoffs did what rotation wouldn’t) and the mission is gone. The care was real; so was the wreckage it licensed.
The corrective is not hardness as performance — the fault is over-solicitude, not solicitude, and Chapter 10 will still tell you to treat soldiers as children. The dividing line is decision rights: care expresses itself in support, honesty, and shared hardship, and stops where it starts overriding what the mission requires. Sun Tzu’s general loves the army enough to keep it an army.