Subtle and Secret
If you are subtle and secret, you will be invisible. If you are invisible, you get to keep your forces together. If you are seen, you must divide your forces. Thus, much strength is gained by being invisible.
The way to make an army weak is that they do not know where you will strike. They will have to divide troops and defend all probabilities. That is why a strike must be kept secret. If the enemy finds out what is going on, they will keep their troops waiting and will build up all defenses for your demise.
Sun Tzu explained dividing their forces like this, “For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.”
A smaller invisible force can defeat a much larger too spread out force. The smaller force must stay invisible to keep an advantage. The smaller force must also be quicker than the larger force. The larger force must not know where the smaller force will attack.
In business, staying invisible gives you time. If some competitor finds out about your great plans, they will begin preparing for you. Once they start preparing for you, you will be forced to defend your position. You may now have to hire a lawyer for lawsuits, you might need to put more people into research to make the product better, you may need to open up another plant that is in a more secretive location. In other words, you can see how much more divided you end up from being discovered.
This is a huge problem on the internet. Large companies track just about everyone online. They use illegal malware to track your every move. Anyone that tries to start an internet company is instantly discovered by a large competitor. The large company will come in and squash the little guy by spamming with hundreds of sites and building zillions of fake backlinks. They might have hundreds of offshore workers competing against a small company of 1-5 people. Should the new company switch to a new niche the larger company will simply follow them around and capitalize on everything they do. The large company will make millions while the little guy makes nothing. If you have ever tried to stay invisible on the internet, you will quickly find out it is nearly impossible to do so. The only people that seem to be able to do it are hackers and so that is who the large companies hire to do their bidding. Most of these large internet companies have black hat hackers in their pocket.
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