16. Let your competitor have an apparent escape route

Anyone who is cornered may as well fight to the death thereby destroying assets you wanted to gain and inflicting substantial damage on you. If there is an apparent escape route your competitor will concentrate on that instead of fighting you. Later, your competitor will be in a weakened condition as the escape route will have depleted his reserves and willingness for another confrontation and may be taken over at little cost.

Although this sounds like contradictory advice it is aimed at reducing the probability of a counter attack when you are attacking a competitor

Imagine you have successfully used a variety of stratagems and now you have your competitor cornered. If your competitor believes that their destruction is inevitable they will either fight to the death or destroy themselves to deny you a victory.

If you show your competitor an apparent escape route they will put all their energy into escaping and not fighting or destruction. The skills comes in keeping sufficient pressure on your competitor in order to keep them off balance and stop them considering any alternatives apart from your carefully constructed escape route which in practice only leads to a further trap.

In business you may have an acquisition target who does not want to be acquired by you. They may try to find a “White Knight” who will rescue them or adopt a “Poison Chalice” to make the acquisition unattractive. You could become the white knight or poison chalice via another enterprise over which you have indirect control.