On Saturday just gone I watched the hockey team that my daughter plays in be over-powered by their opponents. The end score spoke volumes as to how each team had played, with my daughter’s team absolutely overwhelmed in both a score and player performance sense.
During an after-match informal chat with a couple of parents whose daughter played in the same team as my daughter, I gently shared my thoughts as to why I felt our team had been completely demolished by the other team. In a nutshell I saw the main reason being that our team clearly hadn’t shown any real “competitive aggression” during the game; in that they:
a) Didn’t attack the ball when it was in possession of the opposition, to try and claim possession.
b) Didn’t practice any sort of “positional play”, which if practiced would have seen the players position themselves in available space among the opposition players ready to receive the ball from their team-mates.
c) Didn’t strike hard at the goal when the opportunity to score presented itself – so the opposition’s goalie was able to easily prevent the attempt at goal from being a successful goal.
If I translate the above observations into the context of the business world, the equivalent would be:
i) The business didn’t employ a counter-attack when key competition attempted to undermine its market share by introducing a new product…so market share was lost.
ii) The business didn’t have the right people doing the right things at the right time so as to take advantage of a considerable opportunity when it arose…so the opportunity was lost to competitors instead.
iii) When the business launched a variation of an existing product as a counter-attack measure, it didn’t dedicate any real budget to a launch (marketing) campaign…so the launch became a soft (almost subliminal) launch, rather than one which created significant awareness among target customers…so the sales effect of the product launch was diluted and easily combated by competitors.
There seems to be almost a level of apathy among many business people these days, which (whether they realise it or not) is compromising their commercial achievements. In the context of kids’ sport this attitude of complacency is equivalent to coaches/ teachers telling the kids who they coach that “don’t worry about winning, just enjoy the game”. Thankfully many schools are waking-up to the damaging effects of a “participation is good enough” mindset, and have begun to return to communicating a “play hard, play fair and play to win” mantra to pupils.
To be clear, it is perfectly okay to feel competitive when operating your business…and more so, to channel/ harness that sense of competition to drive your business hard in order to realise the commercial objectives that you have set. In fact, if you don’t have a sense of competition operating your business then you perhaps either are not concerned about realising your business potential and/ or (mistakenly) consider that competitors don’t have any real/ significant impact on your business.
Yes, it is perfectly okay to want to win and to employ tactics/ practices that enable you to win !