“The Feint”: Genghis Khan and Henry Kravis—Different Time, Same Tactic

Rule: “A great general (CEO) controls the movements of his competition.”

The Mongols under the rule of the brilliant Genghis Khan, perfected the feint, or feigned retreat, which had been in use for over a thousand years. It’s deceptively simple but requires exacting execution (e.g. good management, a loyal team, signaling skills, etc.). If the enemy couldn’t be shattered on the initial attack the Mongols had a special unit called the mangudai. The mangudai would first make a fearsome charge against the enemy and then would appear to flee in retreat. This was the feint. Thinking an easy victory was available the enemy would often pursue at speed. Not…good.

What they didn’t know was they were, in fact, being controlled by the Mongol leaders (called orloks). The rest is as grim as it is obvious. As the opportunistic enemy chased the light and fast mangudai, hidden Mongol archers would start picking off the pursuers. When the calculated chaos ensued the heavy Mongol cavalry would swoop in and finish the job.

Henry Kravis did the same thing in one critical stage of his eventually successful bid for RJR Nabisco. His feint was when he went off skiing to Vail during the heat of the bidding. His competition in the deal, Peter Cohen et al., thought Kravis had given up and made the decisions based on that. Because of this Henry essentially controlled the crucial next round of bids, as in keeping them low, via his presumed retirement from the action. He then sprang his trap: At a crucial moment he showed up with a bid much higher than anyone else’s. This threw the process into chaos which Kravis and Roberts skillfully, and successfully, exploited.

Ask yourself, does a competitor’s move look too good to be true? Does their move appear to somehow benefit you? If so, question your next logical step as it could be straight into a classic controlling feint which is really nothing more than a simple snare. And a snare works only if someone is foolish enough to step into it. Don’t let that someone be you.

Think about it…

Avoiding Defeat Caused by Victory

It’s been said that one of the greatest causes of defeat on the battlefield, or in business, is simply victory. We often see this in sports teams, too. The team gets thoroughly psyched up to trounce a tougher opponent, succeeds brilliantly, and then promptly gets beaten by a lesser adversary. Good managers, like good coaches and generals, know about this and plan for it. With each victory they don’t relax, but take it up a notch. It’s as important as continuous improvement, but not as fluid. The philosophical cartography of an aggressive, equity holder-centric team, needs both.

Sun Tzu, clearly one of the greatest “team” leaders (military, sports or business is beside the point) in history, made a point of always exploiting his own victories. He did this because he considered not doing so was to have wasted the consumed resources. It’s useful to remember that any honest general (from Sun Tzu to the present) knows that no war is best. Unfortunately that’s not always practical and occasionally you have to engage in military or commercial carnage. Because wars are expensive, in so many ways, the key is to keep the conflict short. Short wars are better than long ones. Always. And don’t fight if you know you can’t win. That’s just stupid. Ask Donald Trump.

One of Sun Tzu’s key shortening strategies was to consolidate his gains, or, to put it another way, constantly build on his successes. Big ones. Little ones. All of them. After all, you are motivated to achieve a success for a reason that materially improves you, otherwise why do it (ego is not a good reason)? You exit the success with the value to the stakeholders somehow improved, which is the object of the exercise.

So, it’s always about taking your achieved victory and using it to methodically bump up your baseline. Always asking yourself, “Ok, we’re a bit better now. How can we exploit our new state and move up to the next level?” Just keep hammering away. Make it a habit; part of your natural thought process. A subtle breeze in a sand desert will eventually wear away a solid building.

This relentless incremental movement forward has some interesting side benefits as well. Like Sun Tzu, Russian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the importance of unambiguously demonstrating your resolve for victory. The constant leveraging of your own victory, for more victory, is a vivid psychological signal to your competition. It says, “Sure, you can try, but it’s going to be costly so you had better be very sure.”

So winning can’t be an isolated incident. You have to sustain it by expanding upon it each and every time it happens. The corporate world is full of individuals and companies that arced victoriously through the commercial sky only to quickly fade away because they forgot to keep building on their success, forgot to always be planning and moving ahead.

The stark reality is, transient victory aside, the moment you stop getting stronger, you start getting weaker. And getting weaker is the beginning of dying. And then you’re dead.

And you’ll deserve it because you didn’t see the hungry eyes in the trees, waiting.

Think about it…