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, succeeds
brilliantly, and then promptly gets 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, equity holder-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. That’s
just stupid. Ask Donald Trump.
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. Make it a habit; part of your natural thought process. A subtle
breeze in a sand desert will eventually wear away a solid building.
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,
forgot to always be planning and moving ahead.
The stark reality is, transient victory aside, the moment you
stop getting stronger, you start getting weaker. And getting weaker is the beginning
of dying. And then you’re dead.
And you’ll deserve it because you didn’t see the hungry eyes
in the trees, waiting.
Think about it…
