"Make an uproar in the east, but attack in the west," -Sun Tzu, 500 B.C.
What is being illustrated below—aside from considerable hubris—are
the timeless battle principles of deception and control. They can work great in
business too. Your competitive intelligence says your competition is going to make
an active, perhaps aggressive move. That’s fine, but YOU must control their
actions—and they must not know you are doing that. As always, a great CEO, just
like a great general, controls the movements of his competition, often by creative
and cost-effective fakery. Below a Fortune-level Chairman/CEO comments on how he
does it…
In reaction to the “snake comment” of a few months ago, where
the CEO compared himself to a Chinese snake (to date, about 110 readers have properly
guessed who the CEO is), one comment that is consistent and certainly reflects good
corpcraft follows:
“I would never attack like a snake. That guy’s crazy. All that
thrashing around? Even with the best management in the world it’s too difficult
to control. It’s better to be subtle. [For example] we send out inexpensive teams
just to show up, make some noise, look interested, then disappear. The next thing
you know they’ve [the competition] sent in their own people and have started spending
money to get in front of us because we’re supposed to be so smart. Fact is we’re
leading them all around by their corporate nose ring and they don’t even know it.
It’s interesting that they haven’t figured it out. But it's great for our equity
holders, and pretty bad for theirs.”
When asked about the chance that his competition have, in fact,
‘figured it out’ he responded, with a grin: “Impossible. I have much better spies!”
I love this guy. He gets it.
Here, getting his competition to open up resource draining outlets,
where the CEO has no intention of competing, allows him to focus his best resources,
all initially deployed in secret, on opening locations where he gets a very solid
market jump on those that can still follow. Note: The individual stock performance
of these competing companies comes as no surprise.
So think about it: What illusion can you create to get your competition
to do something they really shouldn't…
