21. The cicada sheds its skin

This is another stratagem to confuse your competitors. The cicada sheds its skin to both distract competitors and to allow itself to grow.

In business you may have started a company and have decided you need a fundamental change of direction or scale of operation. If you extract the assets from your first company and use them to set up another company you are using this stratagem. You may well keep the first company operational to distract your competitors into thinking there has been no change in your activities.