Do you sincerely want to win? Then you’ll want to know the rules of winning. The 6 secret rules.

           It is a commonplace to refer to business as a game.  Of maneuvers and rules. Of players and referees. Of beginnings and outcomes. Of competition and achievement. Of winners -- and losers.

          If it is a game – doing business can be fun.

          It is the relationship between the possibilities of business and the possibilities of ourselves that constitutes the fun, if not the charm, of running a business. Of competing in business.

          As they say, fishing is fun -- but catching is better.  

          So running a business is fun -- but winning is better.

          Now when equals compete, winning is all about the will to win.

          “Opponents of about equal strength and experience conduct their decisive fights with strengths that are far from equal.

          “Let us not count how many microns stronger one contender is than the other. Something else is more important: one shows the ability to fight and win at the critical moment -- and the other does not,” writes sports psychologist Nikolai Krogius.

          “But what is this capacity to win?”  

          “In trying to isolate it, we cannot confine ourselves to the mysteries of strategy. No less important is the psychological tuning of character, which mobilizes the will.”

          “The will to win is bound up with success. The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will.” -Vince Lombardi

 

 Do you sincerely want to win?

 

          A manager, by the way he deploys and coordinates a company’s assets with purpose and with force, secures a competitive advantage.  In the previous post, “Games Leaders Play,” we explored ten examples, from Intel to Microsoft, where the person running the company harnesses its competitive advantage.   Until competitive advantage becomes decisive advantage. 

          Implicit in the way each CEO played Offensive Coordinator, was the part played by his will to win.  The business plans they executed were game plans where it is one competitor’s stronger will to win that came into play.  That made the difference.

This post explores six ways that the competitive success of a business reflects the will, drive, initiative, and imagination of its top management.

         This comprises the six rules of winning:

 Rule 1:  You need the The Will to Win.

 Rule 2:  You need the Passion to Win.

 Rule 3:  You need the Drive to Win.

 Rule 4:  You need to have the Need to Win.

 Rule 5:  You need Foresight to Win. &

 Rule 6:  You need Insight on How to Win.

 

Rule 1:  You need the The Will to Win.

 

          Byzantine Princess Anna Comnena wrote in her journal a thousand years ago, “A general’s supreme task is to win.”

          The supreme task of any commander is to win.

          The supreme role of a manager today, in a competitive environment, is to win.

 

Do you sincerely want to win?

 

沒有人征服誰不打

Gumption and gazumption.

          Look at Microsoft’s decision to gazump and pre-empt VisiCalc’s VisiOn with an announcement of its own GUI.  This was Bill Gates announcing Windows before there was a Windows.  This was Bill Gates showing confidence in his vision,  This was the same founder who had the guts to drop out of Harvard to not let one moment past in his quest to be first in the race to produce an operating software for the new microcomputers.

          This is a person’s will to win. 

 

          “On offense, don’t see how light you can hit, but how hard.”        –John Heisman

          Or look at Li Ka-Shing’s upstaging US West, fighting them off in their bid for Hong Kong’s new telecom system.  He launched his own communications satellite, making their offering look all last-century.  old-century to thwart and surpass their offering, so as to be technology-wise a generation ahead of them, technology-wise.  

           Or, Commodore Vanderbilt crushing his competitors Robert Fulton and John Stevens in the steamboat wars, “by business strategies which resembled more the tactics of warring armies than the peaceful pursuit of trade.”

          Or, challenger Charles Revson wiping out Hazel Bishop in cosmetics:

“I don’t meet competition, I crush it.”

--Charles Revson, founder of Revlon

 

It’s all about harnessing the will to win.

 

 

 

Rule 2:  You need the Passion to Win.

 

       “When the engineer of a fast mail train cannot hold himself up to a mile a minute,” wrote success philosopher Frank Channing Haddock, “he must give way to a better man.”

           

 

 

            And finance professor Arthur Stone Dewing wrote:

          “The usual causes assigned for failure are not causes but excuses.

          “The real cause is the lack of those human qualities we epitomize by the expression ‘management’.   Business success and failure may be resolved into qualities of the manager. Business failure is due to poor management. All else is excuse.”  

          Dewing was one founders of the Harvard Business School. He also said:  

            “All business enterprises are governed by passion.”         

          If only that rare manager with passion could infuse his organization with the will to beat back the competition, to survive, to win, to conquer ---- with that ramped-up urge to Win when you have the ball & you’re in the red zone. An average NFL team converts red zone possessions to points 83% of the time. There is a point to seizing, taking, keeping, and using the initiative: you score.

Organizations infused by their CEOs with that passion to win include:

• The Fed Ex of Fred Smith competing with Emery Air and U.P.S. and the Post Office.

• The Standard Oil of John D. Rockefeller . . .     “Every man who failed in the oil business had a tale of how John D. had crushed him.” -- oilman John J. McLaurin

• The Southern Pacific of Leland Stanford, dominating all transportation in California by 1880, “believed by the mass of Californians to be indistinguishable from the state itself: it had eyes on everything.”

• The CBS of William Paley -- out-gunning NBC by inventing the Network: giving away the programming for free, in return for the rights to sell the airtime of affiliates.

• The Hutchison Telecom of Li Ka-Shing, competing with and obliterating US West as a competitor by launching its own communications satellite (AsiaSat 1).  

• The Intel of Andy Grove pushing back and overtaking Motorola in his “Operation Crush.”

• The Saatchi & Saatchi of Maurice and Charles Saatchi swallowing their bigger ad agency rivals – Compton, McGaffrey & McCall, Dancer Fitzgerald, and then Ted Bates.

• The Microsoft of Bill Gates competing with VisiCalc’s VisiOn and Corel’s WordPerfect and Netscape’s Navigator.  

• The Kimberly-Clark of Darwin Smith selling off its timber mills, confounding Wall Street’s nay-sayers, and using Huggies and Kleenex to outduel the previously invulnerable Procter & Gamble.

        Products are a CEO’s strategic positioning units in the battle for the market space. Consumer products in the hands of a CEO with the will to win – brands in the hands of a Smith or a Gates -- become weaponized assets. They fight with  passion.  They take no prisoners.  They win.

 

 

Rule 3:  You need the Drive to Win.

 

           “Competitive success involves more than a strong brain,” writes psychologist Amatzia Avni.

          “The critical success factor is competitive drive.”

 

 

          “All business enterprises are the outward embodiment of the moral, social and economic ideas of those who manage them. A business does not expand of itself. It expands as the result of the motives, passions, and hopes of the men who operate it. … All motives for expansion arise out of the preconception that there is increased strength, excellence, or value in increased size.

          “The world measures the success of the corporation by increased size, and secondarily by increased profits. And the bigger the business conquered, the bigger the man. Business growth reflects the spirit of a modern Tamerlane seeking new markets to conquer. Small enterprises are merely pawns for human ambition in the game of business expansion.” –Arthur Stone Dewing

 

            The raiders in their takeover battles sure do illustrate this, from Irwin Jacobs with Pabst to T. Boone Pickens in oil: 

           “It is cheaper to prospect for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, than on the ground.” -T. Boone Pickens

          And, from Saul Steinberg with Reliance to Cal Icahn with TWA:

“I don’t care who wins. As long as I do.” -Carl Icahn

 

Rule 4:  You need to have the Need to Win.

 

            “When you're playing for the national championship, it’s not a matter of life or death. It’s more important than that.” -Duffy Daugherty, Head Coach, Michigan State

          The need to win is felt a bit more consciously than the drive to win:

           “I was up at West Point, strolling the grounds, while talking with some military men. We found ourselves standing before a statue of General Douglas MacArthur. And I couldn’t help but be struck by the inscription, taken from a speech he’d made at the Academy:

           'Your mission is to win wars.'

          “Just win wars. The general was talking to soldiers, of course. But I felt that what he said applied to me. My main purpose in life is to keep winning.” -Donald Trump

“In war there is no substitute for victory.” –General Douglas MacArthur

 

         “One attribute most venture capitalists look for in entrepreneurs is competitiveness.  Because we want to work with people who thrive on winning.   I look for that fighting spirit in those who present to me. 

          “Entrepreneurs play to win. They take losing seriously.  

          “Think Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have some sleepless nights about Twitter, despite having more than 350 million users himself?  

        “I work with people who hate to lose.  I look for people who share my obsession about winning.  I look for people who play to win – every time. . .

         “And if you stumble on to a really good idea, it will get competitive really quickly. You can’t accept simply ceding part of the market to someone else because it’s big.  You need to fight for every inch . . . every win.” – venture capitalist Mark Suster

          “It should be the motto of the defender not to submit to the will of the attacker, but to escape his grip. So we have the necessity of being forever on the lookout for chances of counter-attack.” -Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky, written in Paris when Paris was occupied by the German Army. “This is an ever more pressing need when we are in real danger; there may lie our only salvation: counter-attack.”

 

           Intel’s “Operation Crush” assault on Motorola’s market position began as Andy Grove’s counterattack just for his company to even survive.

 

 

Rule 5:  You need Foresight to Win.

 

I have seen companies grow. I have seen companies die.

 

I have known and counseled CEOs of companies that have prospered. 

 

I have known CEOs of companies that have weakened, decayed, fled the fray, and gone bankrupt. 

In the first group, I would put clients like Arnold Bernhard of Value Line.  David Tang of Pacific Cigar.  Bill Fung of Li & Fung.  T. Boone Pickens. Ted Turner.  Joe Mansueto of Morningstar.  Richard Li of STAR-TV and Pacific Century.  Stephen Weiss of Weiss, Peck & Greer.  Second group, pasty-faced Bill Miller of Textron.  Tom Wyman – face bronzed-from-a-bottle – CEO of CBS and Green Giant. 

Because there are many CEOs like that – they may be equipped with the average doling out of ingenuity, determination, courage, and skill. Yet their firms never quite achieve the leadership position that their technology, their customer acceptance, or their key people and abilities should entitle them to. Why?

Well, they like to get into favorable positions in their market space vis-à-vis their competitors – But then their drive to win fizzles out.

Or, they fail to recognize the turning points in the industry.

Once they achieve a good position, even a dominant one, they fiddle around endlessly. Wasting time. So that what could have been a win, a leadership position in their market space instead becomes a stand-off -- or a market retreat – or defeat – from which their company and their brand never recover.

 

 

          In contrast, look at Andy Grove’s decision to invest in memories at Intel– to bet the whole company on processors --  to put all his chips on chips. 

          “Intel became a business, and memory chips became an industry. As the first mover, we had practically 100% of the market,” recalls Intel co-founder Andy Grove.

          Then suddenly:

          “Japanese memory producers appeared on the scene. People who came back from Japan told scary stories. At one company, memory development activities occupied an entire building.

          “Each floor housed designers working on a different memory generation, all at the same time: On one floor were the 16K people (K = 1,024 bits).  On the floor above were the 64K people.  And on the floor above that, people were working on the 256K-bit memories. There were even rumors that in secret projects, people were working on a one million bit memory.

          “All this was very scary to a little company in Santa Clara, California.

          “And then we were hit by the quality issue. Quality of Japanese memories were consistently and substantially better. T heir quality levels were beyond what we thought was possible.

          “As if this weren’t enough, the Japanese companies had capital advantages. They had limitless access to funds.

          “. . . As the eighties went on, the Japanese producers were building large and modern factories, amassing a capacity base that was awesome from our perspective.

          “Riding the memory wave, the Japanese producers were taking over the world semiconductor market in front of our eyes.”

           So Intel was actually in a position many managers would have written off as hopeless— mentally giving up, yielding to the Japanese competitors’ advantage, showing up for work sitting at their desks with the conviction that it is actually to no avail. That within months, their company would see revenues shrink so far it would not be able to meet loan payments, the banks would be calling, the IRS would put a lien on income, and it would in a matter of months not be able to meet payroll in Santa Clara….

          “I wish it were over,” an inner voice would be announcing, seeking the relief in the end of the struggle . . .

          The creative process is frozen-- yet it is in difficult, challenging, seemingly   positions like that when creativity and resourcefulness are most needed.

           “We fought hard. We improved our quality. We brought our costs down. But the Japanese producers like N.E.C. fought back. . .

          “We got hold of a memo sent to their sales force: ‘Win with the 10% rule. . .  Find Intel sockets. . . Quote 10% below Intel’s price. . . If they requote, go 10% AGAIN. . . Don’t quit till you WIN!’ This kind of thing was discouraging.

          “But we fought on.”

 

 

          “Before you can win a game, you have to not lose it.”–Steelers Coach Chuck Noll – the coach with the most Super Bowl rings.

 

          In football, the quarterback is the leader of the offensive team. And in football, every team must have a system of attack, of plays and formations: featuring a basic offensive formation. In football, the offensive formation is how they deploy their players, how close to one other they position the linemen for protection, and how they position the running backs and the pass receivers for offense.

          In business, it’s how the company deploys its assets actively.

          As in football, so in business.  The CEO leads and coordinates the offense.

          The game plan of football – the plays to be run – is the business plan of the company in summarily dealing with its competition.

          The game plan is a team’s plan on how to beat its opponent: a plan to avoid its strengths, and to exploit its weaknesses. You can be sure that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, for instance, had a game plan for taking down Netscape when Microsoft launched its Internet Explorer in direct competition with Netscape’s then superior product: the Navigator. And where is the Navigator browser now?

          Intel’s Grove also had foresight:  the foresight needed to win.

           Earlier, it had been through a tremendous desire not to lose, that Grove had mustered Intel’s managers to muster the troops for an all-out, bet-the-company assault on Motorola. Intel won that battle. Could this battle be won? If not, was there a better field of combat? Grove thought there was . . .

          But he was treated like a parent who decides to kill his first born. He decided to exit the memory business – Intel’s core business. To kill off the first-born, get out of memories, and bet the company's future on processors.

          It was only through a tremendous will to win that Grove mustered the courage to do it.

          This was a decision not by a company – fiercely divided into memories and processors – but by its CEO.  He met a  lot of resistance.    

            “Andy Grove’s decade as CEO of Intel was a rare case in which a company leader successfully set strategic intent and created a process for its relentless and successful pursuit.” –Professor Robert Burgelman

          Grove achieved that by harnessing his drive to win, his foresight in recognizing a turning point in the industry, and his insight in how to survive as a high-tech business.

And by balancing five key drivers of competitive success for a high-tech venture:

• technology development,

• product development,

• brand development,

• market development, and

• strategy development.

 

         But Grove scorned the idea of fighting only for the mere right to exist.  You don’t fight to merely survive and endure.  

     As Faulkner said at Stockholm:

      “I decline to accept the end. . .  It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure:

       "I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1397

    

 

 

Rule 6:  You need Insight on How to Win.

 

The Insight – the imagination – Needed to know how to Win

 

            “A successful business manager is invariably a man of imagination.” -Arthur Stone Dewing

  

          Thomas Edison grew aggressive in his business dealings, writes biographer Mark Essig, because he was dissatisfied with the early progress of the electric industry. The Edison lighting empire was organized as a three-tier system:

1. “The Edison Electric Light Company held the patents, and licensed them to the independent Edison manufacturing companies.”
2. The manufacturing companies sold the equipment they produced either to individuals who installed isolated lighting systems for use in one office building or one factory; or, to local utilities that built central stations --and then sold electricity in their area.
3. At the parent company, Edison Electric, the Directors hoped that the central station in New York would prove the reliability of electric light-- and lead investors in other cities to organize local utilities.

        "Because the New York station was delayed and over-budget, cities that had contemplated central stations now shied away. The Directors were content to make money from the sale of isolated electric plants."

          With foresight into the future, and insight on how to make it happen, Edison believed the parent company should invest in more central stations to demonstrate the system’s viability.

          "Edison did not want his lights to dot the night landscape in a factory here and a hotel there. He wanted to light whole cities, to make the entire nation glow with the radiance of his lamp.”

 

              

 NFL play card from a Coach Lombardi game plan, from running plays and action passes, to attacking coverages and fronts to use versus the defense.  

 

          As offensive coordinator, the CEO puts in the time and thought, and recognizes when it is time to give a key person a new role – or redeploy an asset -- even though it may an uncommon role. This is what Grove did in saving Intel – and then dominating its market space. By re-deploying people, assets, and resources.

           All sorts of resources.

           “Financial balance sheet items such as capital, plant and equipment, and inventory, are no longer the dominant building blocks of corporate competitiveness in the long run.” –Liam Fahey

           Insight is not just the juice of one action – it takes resolve to carry through from action to action. Just as a plan is a sequencing of targets, you keep your resolve from one milestone in the strategic plan of action to the next. resolution – not just a one time thing but a continued pattern of actions, resolved and carrying resolve through taking action after action.

 

            Yes, Byzantine Princess Anna Comnena wrote in her journal a thousand years ago, “A general’s supreme task is to win.”

            Everything else you learn about winning is icing on the cake.  This is the cake.  These six requirements:

             You need:

• The will to win.
• The passion to win.
• The drive to win.
• The need to win.
• The foresight to win.
• The insight to know how to win.

         

        Competition is life, competition creates life. Everything comes with a user’s manual but life. These posts comprise that manual.  On competition in life.

            Because everything you want, you fight for. Only the strong survive. Only the stronger win. Only the strongest prevail.

            Now who would have thought a scrawny, weak immigrant who couldn’t bench press a hundred pounds, would give us the ultimate weapon of strength?   Weak muscles, but a strong, energized brain. Will power, creativity, imagination and intellect. Albert Einstein, a nerd in a sweater, imagined and helped construct the atom bomb.  

            So if you want strong muscles, go to the gym. If you want a friend, get a dog. If you want to use your brain like a fist, read these posts. These are the precepts of war. Use them.

 

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