“Lure with bait; strike with chaos.” (Sun Tzu) Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War sais: „Lure with bait; strike with chaos.“ In this context first of all the literal meaning of bait appears to be essential:”Food placed on a hook or in a net, trap, or fishing area to entice fish or other animals as prey.” (oed). Next to this literal meaning, figurative meanings are possible, such as offer advantages, gains, as well as earnings or additional courses of action. Of course, the advantage, mentioned by Sun Tzu, is only the front side of the coin and not the reverse. The reverse is disadvantage or hampering the opponent. This dichotomy (a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different (oed)) is also provided in many other books, such as the compilation about negotiation of HBR. Best explained is this subject matter by an example. After you motivated an opponent to flee in a “save house” – with his bicycle –, you offer him, on the one hand, an advantage, and on the other, you steer him with a disadvantage. In other words, the bicycle in front of house, which you destroy, is the disadvantage. The golden bridge you build over the river behind the house is the bait or the advantage. You burn down the house, then, while you organize a terrible noise – acoustic harassment, for exmaple. Consequently, the opponent cannot flee with his bicycle, but over the golden bridge. On the other side of the river, however, you arranged an ambush and there you defeat your opponent. With other words, you offer him an escape and exploit his movement, eventually. In the movie Spy Game, representing the deceptive aspects of espionage, Robert Redford tells a Lebanon physician working in Beirut, exactly in a refugee camp, that his parents were killed by a particular terror organisation, what motivates him for retaliation (advantage). In actual fact, however, this depiction might only be a “bait to lure him into a trap”. The physician’s death is caused by a car bomb in Beirut.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 15:44:35 +0000
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