调虎离山
Never attack a strong enemy in the position that makes them strong. Draw them away from their mountain — their fortress, their home ground, their support — into the open, then deal with them where their advantage is gone.
The principle
Strength is often positional: a fortress, a home market, a supportive crowd, a favourable rule-set. Attack the enemy there and you fight their advantage as well as them. The stratagem separates the two — bait the enemy into leaving the ground that empowers them, whether by threatening something they must protect, dangling an opportunity they can't resist, or feigning weakness elsewhere. Once they've left the mountain, the tiger is just a tiger. The whole difficulty is the lure: it must be worth more to them than the safety they give up.
Historical origin
Applied today
Don't fight a dominant rival on their core turf. Draw them into responding on your terms — a new format, a different channel, a fight over an issue where their scale is a liability, not an asset.
Get a hard counterpart out of the setting where they hold all the cards — the formal boardroom, the crowd, the script — into an informal one-on-one where their institutional power counts for less.
In practice
Invented scenarios showing this stratagem at work — illustrations, not reports of real events.
The one who knew the migrations
A competitor made a generous offer to a single engineer — not the most senior, but the only one who had run a customer migration end to end. He left. The next three onboardings took a quarter each instead of a month, and two prospects walked during the delay. Nothing had been attacked. One person had simply been invited down off the mountain.
Use it Identify which individuals hold undocumented capability and document it — a rival only has to hire one of them.
A copy, just for the demo
The request was reasonable and came from inside: a demonstration environment with realistic data, built quickly, outside the usual platform because approvals there took a week. It ran for two months on a personal cloud account behind one shared password. Production was never touched. The data had simply been persuaded to walk out of the place where it was defended.
Use it Data leaves protection long before it leaks — treat convenience copies outside the perimeter as production, or refuse them.
Off the feed, onto the list
Ninety thousand followers produced reliable applause and unreliable orders, and reach halved twice in a year without warning or explanation. The brand began trading its best material for email addresses instead. The audience that made the move was a fraction of the original and bought at eleven times the rate, on ground the brand actually owned.
Use it Move the audience onto a channel you control — reach you rent can be repriced overnight by somebody else.
The dinner without the engineers
The supplier proposed settling the remaining points over dinner with the two executives, describing the technical team's questions as detail that could follow. The remaining points were the migration guarantees. Agreed in principle at the table and drafted afterwards, they came back weaker than either executive had understood them to be. The people who would have noticed had been thanked and excused.
Use it Never close technical terms without the people who understand them — separating you from your specialists is itself the manoeuvre.