Learning from Cook Ding

Outside of tired (and usually misunderstood) quotes from Sun Tzu’s “the Art of War”, I wonder how many modern professionals, of any stripe, are actively looking to learn from the classics of ancient Chinese philosophy?

Because they really should be.

OK, Confucius isn’t going to give you chapter and verse on precisely what changes to the Google Ads bidding system mean in 2026. But most marketing teams and marketing strategies don’t fail because of poor execution or a failure to understand what best practice looks like. Or at least, they really shouldn’t when this is precisely where AI delivers most value. 

No, they usually fail because, contrary to today’s lesson, they attempt the impossible. Some combination of the wrong message, the wrong audience or the wrong tools (or all three, what the hell) meant that success was never a realistic outcome. 

If you are asking yourself how and why this happens, the usual suspects are:

• Company X does this and they are bigger than us, so it should work (spoiler alert, Company X are often in a completely different industry)

• I heard Tim Ferriss say it worked on a podcast I listen to

• A line item for this activity was put into the budget 3 years ago, so we need to spend it

I could go on, and indeed I have in the past, at some length. Now don’t get me wrong, of course we should be looking for inspiration from wherever we can find it. It’s just that if we include before-common-era Chinese philosophers in that group, we won’t make some of those mistakes. 

On which note, let me introduce you to Zhuang Zhou, author of the Zhuangzi.

Cook Ding and understanding the world

The Zhuangzi is a collection of stories and wisdom that could broadly be described as Taoist. Among the most famous of those stories is that of Cook Ding, who cuts up an ox carcass using infinite skill, and by doing so teaches the onlooking Lord Wenhui how to work with the world as it is:

“I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are”

I recounted this story to a former colleague over coffee last week. For me it perfectly encapsulates the absolute importance of understanding the world first before attempting to change it, and of working with the world rather than against it. 

For marketers, it has two very specific practical messages. Let’s talk about each in turn.

Lesson 1: sometimes, you should stop doing things that don’t work

As mentioned above, many, many marketing leaders share one specific, deeply ingrained prejudice: if something isn’t working, it is because the tactical execution is wrong. The extension of that thought is that we need to keep optimising and testing things until it does.

Cook Ding would see things differently. 

He would look at what does work, rather than fretting about what doesn’t. He would accept that sometimes it is right and proper to step away, think of another approach, and not attempt to make a cut where doing so is just mindless expending of energy. 

If you prefer, you can think of it like this:

Effort spent optimising a low number is usually a waste of time and money. It’s not working for a reason, and even if you increased your metrics 50% it probably amounts to not much. Effort spent optimising a big number is different. Exploring new ways to make what works, work better usually delivers ROI. 

Following that approach sometimes means making big decisions, like shutting down channels that you can’t make work.

That can be hard. It feels like admitting failure, and indeed sometimes that is precisely what it is. Nobody wants to walk into a CEO’s office and tell her that Google Ads aren’t delivering ROI and so you are shutting them down. But that’s a CMO’s job just the same way as doing the fun stuff is.

But before you rush to any hasty conclusions, learn lesson 2:

Lesson 2: understanding the world is everything

When carving up an ox, Cook Ding operates with great care and is acutely sensitive to feedback:

“whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety”

It is the same for marketers. How do we know about the world? The short answer is that we learn from our own experience, from the experiences of others, and from data*. Data is, indeed, incredibly important. We should always be attuned to signals and feedback, put in place the systems to collect that information, accurately and in a timely fashion, and most importantly of all respect what it tells us.

Data can and should be used to optimise our activities. Nothing in this piece should be seen as a manifesto for apathy, shrugging the shoulders and announcing that “channel x doesn’t work” after a couple of desultory attempts at it. 

But when data tells us that something isn’t working, and isn’t going to work: respect it. 

This is always where even smart, experienced marketers and executives come unstuck. Because my experience is that everybody loves data until it tells them something they don’t like. At which point they look for any possible reason to ignore it.

Don’t make that mistake. Cook Ding warns against hacking against the grain of nature as a demoralising waste of effort, and he is right. Follow things as they are.

A final point. “Things as they are” encompasses the world, the market, your product, your audience, the rest of your marketing activity and your sales and marketing processes. What stops something working may well be under your own control.

But unless you fix it, you will be like the mediocre cook of the story: hacking.

*”By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest” - Confucius.