Zen and the art of tax

Now you must have seen The Magnificent Seven: Yul Bryner and six compadres join forces to save an impoverished Mexican village from the clutches of evil bandits.

What you may or may not know is that this is actually a remake of an earlier Japanese film The Seven Samurai  in which the village of some Japanese peasant farmers is attacked by bandits. The farmers enlist a samurai to help them and he recruits six others.

I'm afraid to say that this article is not a review of director Akira Kurosawa's films — although for anyone who has not seen them I definitely recommend this one as well as the later Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) and Ran as visual feasts.

But following on from the success of Sun Tzu's book The Art of War and its application to business planning and decision-making what did occur to me was...