|
-------
Avoiding Defeat Caused
by Victory
It’s been said that one of the
greatest causes of defeat on the battlefield, or in
business, is simply victory. We often see this in sports
teams, too. The team gets thoroughly psyched up to
trounce a tougher opponent only to succeed brilliantly
and then promptly get beaten by a lesser adversary. Good
managers, like good coaches and generals, know about
this and plan for it. With each victory they don’t
relax, but take it up a notch. It’s as important as
continuous improvement, but not as fluid. The
philosophical cartography of an aggressive, shareholder
centric team needs both.
Sun Tzu, clearly one of the greatest “team” leaders
(military, sports or business is beside the point) in
history, made a point of always exploiting his own
victories. He did this because he considered not doing
so was to have wasted the consumed resources. It’s
useful to remember that any honest general (from Sun Tzu
to the present) knows that no war is best. Unfortunately
that’s not always practical and occasionally you have to
engage in military or commercial carnage. Because wars
are expensive in so many ways the key is to keep the
conflict short. Short wars are better than long ones.
Always. And don’t fight if you know you can’t win.
One of Sun Tzu’s key shortening strategies was to
consolidate his gains, or, to put it another way,
constantly build on his successes. Big ones. Little
ones. All of them. After all, you are motivated to
achieve a success for a reason that materially improves
you, otherwise why do it (ego is not a good reason)? You
exit the success with the value to the stakeholders
somehow improved, which is the object of the exercise.
So, it’s always about taking your achieved victory and
using it to methodically bump up your baseline. Always
asking yourself, “Ok, we’re a bit better now. How can we
exploit our new state and move up to the next level?”
Just keep hammering away.
This relentless incremental movement forward has some
interesting side benefits as well. Like Sun Tzu, Russian
military strategist Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the
importance of unambiguously demonstrating your resolve
for victory. The constant leveraging of your own victory
for more victory is a vivid psychological signal to your
competition. It says, “Sure, you can try, but it’s going
to be costly so you had better be very sure.”
So winning can’t be an isolated incident. You have to
sustain it by expanding upon it each and every time it
happens. The corporate world is full of individuals and
companies that arced victoriously through the commercial
sky only to quickly fade away because they forgot to
keep building on their success, always planning and
moving ahead.
The stark reality is once you stop, you’re dead because
somebody smart, who is always waiting and watching, will
observe your weakness and run you over.
And you’ll deserve it.
-----
All previous CorpWar issues are archived here.
|
