I was watching our daughter’s hockey team play their Saturday morning game, this morning. It was clear to not only myself, but to other parents around me, that our team was being overwhelmed by the opposing team – largely through:
a) not pushing themselves to be “competitively aggressive”…to go in for the ball and contest hard for possession of the ball.
b) not staying with the opposition when the opposition took the ball from them…in a bid to try and reclaim possession.
I can’t emphasise enough the importance of business people applying the best of themselves on the coalface every single day that they go to work. In the competitive world that we all live, you simply cannot hope to win unless you do.
The world needs to give itself a damn good shake and wake-up to the fact that “being the nice person who is liked by many people” won’t necessarily amount to a winning person – a person who who is effective at leading others to be successful. In short, the PC Culture needs to be shaken from its comfortable roost, to make rose coloured glasses fall of faces, and to only then have reality restored.
And you know what, if this happens then people may then be forced to make “real life” decisions around their sustainability – both their own sustainability as individuals and that of their organisations/ businesses. Sometimes it takes a bit of “shock” in order for the right decisions to start being made.
My advice to business owners is that it is perfectly okay to feel competition flow through your veins. This is a natural experience, and quite honestly if as a business owner you don’t have this feeling of wanting to win then maybe the business realm isn’t for you…and you need to think about an alternative vocation instead.
Thinking about the aspect of possession for a minute – and hockey players not wanting to remaining attacking their opposition players after having the ball taken from them; if a competitor launches an attack in the market (e.g. new product launch), as a business owner what is your reaction to such an attack ? Do you put together a plan to combat the competitor’s attack and proceed to counter-attack, or do you instead tend to do nothing, hope for the best and allow the competitor’s actions to play-out unchallenged ?
I know of businesses that kidded themselves into thinking that a competitor’s newly launched game-play wouldn’t have any adverse effect on their business. How wrong they were. This denial of competitor success is symptomatic of a psyche of “I know what’s best” and “blind hope”. Unfortunately, such formed impressions are mostly driven by ego, and as many people know allowing ego to prevail over objectively-made well-reasoned judgments typically doesn’t result in desirable outcomes.
If you want to experience wins in life then you need to become – and remain – a competitive force to be reckoned with (i.e. have and use your competitive aggression); and as/ when the ball (available customer budget) is taken away from you due to competitor influence you must develop and launch a counter-attack each time this happens, to get the ball back in your court.