Stratagem 17 of 36

Tossing Out a Brick to Attract Jade

抛砖引玉

Stratagems of Attacking · 攻战计

Core Definition

核心释义

Offer something of lesser value to obtain something greater. Use bait to draw out the enemy's valuable assets or information.

类以诱之,击蒙也。

Historical Origin

历史典故

The Classic Story

A Tang dynasty poet deliberately wrote a mediocre poem to provoke his talented friend into composing a superior one in response. The "brick" of the inferior verse drew out the "jade" of a masterpiece.

唐代诗人故意作一首平庸的诗,激起才华横溢的友人回应一首佳作。以"砖"引"玉",用拙作引出杰作。

Modern Applications

现代应用
  • Offering an initial low bid to draw out the competitor's best offer
  • Sharing partial insights to elicit more valuable information from others
  • Launching a basic version of a product to draw out competitor innovations
  • Making deliberate "mistakes" in proposals to get corrections with hidden insights

Supplementary Case Studies

补充案例分析

Wikipedia Seeding Strategy

Wikipedia founders initially wrote thousands of "brick" articles themselves — mediocre stub entries that invited others to improve them. These imperfect starting points drew out expert contributors who threw "jade" — comprehensive, high-quality content.

维基百科创始人最初自己撰写了数千篇"砖块"文章——质量一般的条目,吸引他人来改进。这些不完美的起点引出了专家贡献者抛出的"玉石"——全面高质量的内容。

Open Source Software Movement

Linus Torvalds released Linux as a minimal, imperfect kernel — a "brick." The open source community responded by contributing millions of lines of code — "jade." The initial offering of something free and incomplete attracted far greater value in return.

Linus Torvalds将Linux作为一个最小化、不完美的内核发布——一块"砖"。开源社区回应以数百万行代码——"玉"。最初免费提供不完整的东西,吸引了远超其价值的回报。