“I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.” Arnold Schwarzenegger

Winning builds confidence, creates momentum, and fuels growth. Losing produces doubt, destroys morale, and breeds failure. It’s said that “Winning isn’t everything,” but actually, it is. Or at least it feels that way. Will we always win? No. Can we learn from losses. Absolutely. But what I observe in business is that when losing becomes the norm and leaders fail to set standards high enough to win, people get used to it. Worse yet, it becomes acceptable. Then losing insidiously embeds itself in the culture. Has losing become a part of your culture?

There are both qualitative and quantitative effects of winning. Nelson Mandela’s winning of the presidency of South Africa brought the end of apartheid and the dawn of democracy, improving the lives of tens of millions of people and becoming a beacon of hope for the world. Boxer Manny Pacquiao’s journey from extreme poverty to winning eight boxing division world championships became a symbol of national pride for the Philippines and inspired millions of Filipinos and others to strive to overcome extreme obstacles to reach their full potential.

Winning in business is typically defined by the numbers. The numbers may be revenue, operating margin, sales, return on invested capital, market share, or a host of other metrics. One of the common pitfalls of leadership teams is not clearly defining what a “win” looks like for their people. How does your team define winning?

The clearest path to winning is strategy. Whether it’s in sports, politics, business, or other arenas, the key to winning is allocating your resources (time, talent, finances) to create a differentiated approach or system of activities to achieve your goal. When the goal is to win in business, strategy is how you create differentiated value to outperform the competition in serving customers to make it happen.

A business case-in-point for strategy: The Evergreen Project out of Harvard University led by Nitin Nohria, former Dean of the Harvard Business School, is one of the most statistically rigorous management research studies ever conducted on the keys to enduring business success. A total of 160 companies were reviewed over a ten-year period to determine which management practices were essential to a company’s financial success. The firms with strong strategy development outperformed the losing companies by 332% in sales and 304% in operating income. Is your business outperforming the competition at these rates? If not, you have a great opportunity to level up your approach to strategy.

When I help executive teams develop winning strategy through strategic thinking and planning workshops, we use a 3C Framework: Context, Competencies, and Capabilities.

First, we zoom out and look at the current context of the business, assessing market patterns, customer behaviors, and the competitive landscape. Later in the Deep Dive Strategy Process, we examine the company, starting with competencies and capabilities.

The success of any organization is built on the foundation of core competencies and capabilities. A core competency is an area of expertise, or foundational body of knowledge. A capability is the combination of skills and activities utilized to execute in the role. Simply put, a core competency is “what you know” and a capability is “what you do.” Examples of core competencies are industry dynamics, brand architecture, and a consultative selling approach while examples of capabilities include just-in-time manufacturing, point-of-sale data analytics, and inventory cycling. It’s beneficial to identify 1-3 core competencies and 3-5 key capabilities to serve as the foundation for your business.

After reviewing context, competencies, and capabilities and mining them for insights, we move to designing competitive strategy. This involves several exercises to map competing value propositions, identify points of advantage, parity, and disadvantage, and consider competitive positioning. From there we discuss trade-offs, reallocation of resources and prioritization, which lead to a one-page Strategic Framework and culminates in a 2-page StrategyPrint, or strategic action plan.

This is what a proactive approach to winning looks like for high-performing teams. A study by Wiita and Leonard of 49 enterprise leadership teams on how they spend their time showed that high-performing teams invest 54% more time setting strategic direction compared to low-performing teams These lower-performing teams also spend 83% more time firefighting at a tactical level. Consider your team: are you proactively investing time on a regular basis to set strategic direction or reacting like bumper cars, bouncing from one shiny object to the next?

David Novak, former CEO of Yum! Brands which include popular companies such as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell said, “I believe this focus on winning and the mindset of learning from wins was one of the biggest factors in our sustained success. We celebrated wins more than we punished losses. We spread winning ideas. We assessed how our competitors were winning. We kept at it year after year.”

The sports playoff motto is, “Win or go home.” The business equivalent is, “Win or go broke.” It’s time for your team to take a good look in the mirror and ask yourselves: Are we winning? If the honest answer is no, then carve out time to strategize. Your business life depends on it.

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