Try to convince someone directly and watch what happens. They get more certain, not less.
Greene's diagnosis of why is the premise of the whole chapter:
When you attack people directly, you stiffen their resistance and make your task that much harder.1
And then the question that should be uncomfortable:
what is the point of being direct and frontal if it only increases people's resistance, and makes them more certain of their own ideas? Directness and honesty may give you a feeling of relief, but they also stir up antagonism. As tactics they are ineffective.1
That is a claim about tactics, not about ethics, and the chapter keeps them carefully separate — which is worth noticing, because a reader can accept the tactical point entirely and still decline the rest.
The chapter's opening is a description of modern social pressure, and it is unusually vivid.
If we had to map the battles of our own daily lives, we would draw thousands of those arrows, a constant traffic of moves and maneuvers—not to speak of the arrows actually hitting us, the people trying to persuade us of one thing or another, to move us in a particular direction, to bend us to their will, their product, their cause.1
Because so many people are shifting for power, the social world becomes blanketed in barely disguised aggression. Being indirect takes time and patience; in the daily rush, people take the direct route. They use argument and rhetoric, growing louder and more emotional. They push and pull with words and orders. And even the passive players who work through manipulation and guilt are, Greene notes, quite direct — witness a few of their maneuvers and they are easy to figure out.1
The result is twofold and self-reinforcing.
We have all become defensive and resistant to change, building our castle walls ever higher and thicker. And the brutality is unavoidable anyway — the arrows hitting us infect us with their energy, and we cannot help giving back what we get, dragged into head-to-head battles.1
It takes effort to step away from this vicious arena and consider another approach.1
The military form is the manoeuvre sur les derrières, and Greene builds the chapter's method directly on it.
Its success rests on two facts about how armies — and people — hold themselves:
First, generals like to place their armies in a strong frontal position, whether to make an attack or to meet one.1
Napoleon played on this tendency by seeming to engage frontally, and in the fog of battle it was hard to tell that only half his army was deployed there while the other half went to the flank or rear.1
Second, an army sensing attack from the flank is alarmed and vulnerable and must turn to face the threat. This moment of turning contains great weakness and confusion.1
And the note that makes it more than a tactic:
Even an army in the stronger position, like d'Alvintzi's at Verona, will almost always lose cohesion and balance as it turns.1
The full case is Arcola and the Manoeuvre sur les Derrières.
The sequencing rule is stated flatly:
The key to any flanking maneuver is to proceed in steps. Your initial move cannot reveal your intentions or true line of attack. . . . First hit them directly, as Napoleon did the Austrians at Caldiero, to hold their attention to the front. Let them come at you mano a mano. An attack from the side now will be unexpected and hard to combat.1
Then the transposition, which is the chapter's most useful paragraph.
Individuals often show their flank, signal their vulnerability, by its opposite, the front they show most visibly to the world.1
The front can be an aggressive personality — dealing with people by pushing them around. It can be an obvious defence mechanism, a focus on keeping intruders out to maintain stability. It can be their most cherished beliefs. It can be the way they make themselves liked.1
And the operating instruction:
The more you get people to expose this front, to show more of themselves and the directions they tend to move in, the more their unprotected flanks will come into focus—unconscious desires, gaping insecurities, precarious alliances, uncontrollable compulsions.1
All enemies are vulnerable from their sides. There is no defense against a well-designed flanking maneuver.1
The counterintuitive half of the technique: you make someone more comfortable in order to flank them.
Think of people's ego and vanity as a kind of front. When they are attacking you and you don't know why, it is often because you have inadvertently threatened their ego, their sense of importance in the world.1
So the preparatory move is to make people feel secure about themselves — subtle flattery, a gift, an unexpected promotion, an offer of alliance, a presentation of you and they as equals, a mirroring of their ideas and values.
All of it anchors them in their frontal position relative to the world, lowers their defences and makes them like you.1
Secure and comfortable, they are now set up for a flanking maneuver. This is particularly devastating with a target whose ego is delicate.1
The Countess de Castiglione is the case Greene builds this on — a seduction planned like a military campaign, down to the dresses and the glances, in order to plant a political idea. See The Countess de Castiglione and the Planted Affair.
His instruction from it:
Never reveal your intentions or goals; instead use charm, pleasant conversation, humor, flattery—whatever works—to hold people's attention to the front. Their focus elsewhere, their flank is exposed, and now when you drop hints or suggest subtle changes in direction, the gates are open and the walls are down.1
There is a second and quite different method in the chapter, and Caesar is its exemplar.
Instead of attacking someone's side, you take it — support their causes, give them gifts, charm them with words and favours.
With Caesar apparently on their side, both politically and psychologically they had no front to fight against, nothing to oppose. In contact with Caesar, all hostility toward him melted away.1
Greene's argument for why this beats winning:
What good is it to win little battles, to succeed in pushing people around here and there, if in the long run you create silent enemies who will sabotage you later?1
Taking the fight out of people through strategic acts of kindness, generosity, and charm will clear your path, helping you to save energy for the fights you cannot avoid.1
And the sting in the tail, which the chapter states without embarrassment:
Disarmed like this, enemy becomes ally, negative becomes positive. Later on, if necessary, when the former foe's guard is down, you can exact retribution, as Caesar did with the pirates.1
See Caesar and the Occupied Flank.
The third method inverts the second: rather than approaching their side, you get them to extend one.
A common way of using the flanking maneuver in war is to get your enemies to expose themselves on a weak salient. This means maneuvering them onto ground or luring them to advance in such a way that their front is narrow and their flanks are long—a delicious target for a side attack.1
The social version rests on an observation about how people argue:
When people present their ideas and arguments, they often censor themselves, trying to appear more conciliatory and flexible than is actually the case. If you attack them directly from the front, you end up not getting very far, because there isn't much there to aim at.1
So:
Instead try to make them go further with their ideas, giving you a bigger target. Do this by standing back, seeming to go along, and baiting them into moving rashly ahead. . . . They will expose themselves on a weak salient, advancing an indefensible argument or position that will make them look ridiculous.1
The key is never to strike too early. Give your opponents time to hang themselves.1
Cortés running this on the Velázquez faction is the case: Cortés and the Exposed Salient.
And the fourth target, named separately:
In a political world, people are dependent on their social position. . . . That support, the base of most people's power, presents a rich flank to expose and attack.1
Roosevelt could get a politician to sign off on a bill or a nomination, whatever his real views, by threatening a maneuver that would injure his popularity with his constituents.1
The chapter's closing principle is about compounding indirection.
In 1801 Napoleon offered Russia the chance to become protector of Malta, then under French control — an important Mediterranean base and an apparently generous gift. He knew the English coveted the island, had the forces to take it, and that the French navy was too weak to hold it. The English and Russians were allies, and their alliance would be endangered by a squabble over Malta.
That discord was Napoleon's goal all along.1
The ultimate evolution of strategy is toward more and more indirection. An opponent who cannot see where you are heading is at a severe disadvantage. The more angles you use—like a cue ball in billiards caroming off several sides of the table—the harder it will be for your opponents to defend themselves. Whenever possible, calculate your moves to produce this caroming effect. It is the perfect disguise for your aggression.1
Greene's Reversal is specific and worth keeping, because it names the strategy's expiry date.
Occupying an opponent's flank by taking a similar position — co-opting their ideas for your own purposes — is powerful, and Clinton used it to great effect in his triangulations with the Republicans. It leaves the opponent nothing to strike at.1
But:
staying too long on the opponent's flank can bring a price: the public—the real soft flank for any politician—loses its sense of what the triangulator stands for, what sets him and his party apart from the other side.1
Beware of occupying the opponent's flank at the expense of exposing your own.1
Polarity, he notes, is more effective in the long run — which points straight back at Strategy 1.
You need someone to move and every direct attempt has hardened them.
Stop making the case. That is the first and hardest instruction, because the case is good and you want to deliver it.
Instead, work out what their front is. Not what they believe — what they display. The aggression, the reasonableness, the expertise, the busyness, the moral seriousness. Whatever they are most visibly being is where their attention is committed, and attention committed forward is attention not available sideways.
Then secure the front rather than threatening it. Make them feel more like the thing they are being — competent, respected, in charge, principled. This feels like conceding and it is the opposite: an ego under threat is an ego paying attention.
Then move at an angle, in a small step. Not the argument. The adjacent question, the hint, the third party who mentions it, the version of your idea that arrives as an extension of theirs. Their focus is forward and the side is open.
Where the resistance is an argument rather than a person, do the opposite of confronting it: get them to extend it. Agree, encourage, ask them to elaborate, invite the full version. Most people hold a moderate public position over a stronger private one, and the moderate version is unattackable because there's nothing there. The extended version is a salient. And do not strike when it first appears — the instruction is explicit, and premature attack is the standard error.
Where you can afford it, occupy the flank instead of attacking it. Back their thing. Give them the win they wanted. An opponent who has been supported has no front to face you with, and you have spent far less than a fight would have cost.
Then check the Reversal against yourself. If you have been agreeing with someone for months in order to stay close to them, ask what you now visibly stand for. That is the bill, and it arrives late.
The military material is solid — the manoeuvre sur les derrières is a real and well-documented Napoleonic system, and Chandler is quoted at length and accurately. [POPULAR SOURCE] for the transposition.
The chapter's central psychological claim is asserted, not demonstrated. "Individuals show their flank by its opposite, the front they show most visibly" is offered as an operating rule with no case attached and no way to check it. It is the same unfalsifiable structure as the masked opposite five chapters earlier — every visible trait indicates something hidden, and no observation can disconfirm it. Read as a map rather than a decoder it survives: the more front someone shows, the more side is exposed, regardless of what's behind it. That version doesn't require you to be right about the contents.
And the chapter runs three genuinely different techniques under one name. Flanking (approach at an angle), occupying (take their side), and baiting a salient (get them to over-extend) require different access, different timescales and different risks. Greene teaches them as one skill. The distinction that matters: flanking works on someone paying attention elsewhere; occupying works on someone who wants something; baiting works only on someone who is already moderating a stronger position.
The ethical structure is where this chapter is most slippery, and it is worth naming precisely. Greene's case for indirection is explicitly tactical — directness is ineffective, not wrong. He then adds, without argument, that acquired allies can be turned on later when their guard is down, and Caesar's crucifixion of the pirates who had adopted him is offered admiringly. The technique and the betrayal are presented as one continuous piece of craft, and nothing in the chapter distinguishes generosity that means it from generosity that is waiting.
Against Strategy 1: The Polarity Strategy the collision is direct, and this time Greene sees it — the Reversal names Chapter 1 explicitly and concedes that polarity is more effective in the long run.
Strategy 1: sharpen your differences, define yourself against an enemy, be unmistakable. Strategy 18: obscure your differences, take their side, never reveal your intentions.
The reconciliation the Reversal implies without stating: flanking is a tactic and polarity is a position. You can occupy someone's flank to win a specific fight, and you cannot occupy it as a way of being, because the thing that erodes is the public's sense of what you are. Clinton is the example of both halves.
Against Erickson and the Utilization Technique the convergence is exact and Greene never draws it. Erickson's method is the turning strategy performed on motivation — agree with the resistance, join it, then divert. Both chapters open with the identical premise that direct pressure stiffens resistance. Greene files one under forcing strategies and one under turning, three chapters apart.
Against Strategy 15: Forcing Strategies there is an overlap worth separating. "Shift the battlefield" moves the fight to terrain that suits you; the turning maneuver leaves the terrain alone and changes your angle of approach to it. Both are indirect. Only the first requires the other side to follow you somewhere.
Psychology → Reactance, and Why the Best Argument Loses. The chapter's founding claim has a well-established name: people experience a direct attempt to change their position as a threat to their autonomy, and the reliable response is to defend the position more strongly than before the attempt. The quality of the argument does not moderate this — a stronger argument, delivered frontally, can produce a larger hardening because the threat is larger.
The insight the pairing produces: this makes persuasive skill actively counterproductive in the frontal mode, which explains a pattern most people have observed and cannot account for. The most articulate person in a disagreement frequently changes the fewest minds, and concludes they need to explain better. They are optimising the variable that is hurting them. The functional move is not a better argument but a change of vector — arriving as an extension of the other person's position rather than as a correction to it — and this is precisely the move that feels like giving ground to someone who is confident they are right.
Business → Land-and-Expand as a Flanking Doctrine. Enterprise software's dominant go-to-market is the turning maneuver with the vocabulary changed: don't contest the incumbent's core account, enter through an adjacent low-stakes use case, become indispensable at the edge, then expand inward. Frontal displacement fails because it triggers the incumbent's entire defensive apparatus — procurement, relationships, switching costs, the buyer's own sunk credibility.
The insight neither domain gives alone: the flank in a commercial setting is almost always the place where the incumbent's own decision-makers aren't looking, and that place is defined by their internal politics rather than by the market. The neglected team, the workflow nobody owns, the region below the reporting threshold — these are unguarded not because they lack value but because guarding them wouldn't advance anyone's career inside the incumbent. Which means competitive flank-finding is really org-chart reading, and the most predictive question about any large competitor is not what they do well but which parts of their business no senior person is personally invested in.
The front someone shows the world is where their attention is committed — which means the more visibly they are being something, the less of them is available to defend the sides. And the practical consequence is that making an opponent more secure in their position is a preparatory move rather than a concession, because a threatened ego is an alert one.