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November 04, 2004

Taking Goals for Granted

Outside the auditorium of our talk today at Northwest Entreprenuer University, I has a very interesting discussion with someone. An old collegue of Rich's had read the book and had a very intriguing bone to pick.

He noted that throughout the whole book and the whole concept fo the playbook, we were, in fact, assumptive about the goals of the reader. At one point we talk about how strategy is important because winning is important and you generally need a strategy to win.

We also, at least in several of the plays and with our Sun Tzu warfare quotations, imply that there winning means someone else has to lose, that you beat someone in a dragrace, that you squeeze someone between a high and low and that you surpass others with your best of both.

He rightly pointed out that this seemed to contradict one of the core principles of the playbook - that you shouldn't take things for granted. That we in fact were taking for granted the notion that people wanted to be competitive, that "winning" was their goal vs. something else.

This is intriguing. Looking back at real life and all the situations we have faced, with partners, investors, customers etc., somewhere along the line the central role of competition became so deeply ingrained in us - competition for dollars, for employees, for attention, for mindshare, for time - that we take for granted that it makes sense to define goals with this context in mind. But this actually is presumptive for a bunch of people - like my sister and other friends in non profits or other less obviously competitive markets.

I really believe that some form of competition is good and healthy and essential. If you can't think of it you need to invent it to keep things interesting, challenging and moving forward. But that said, it may take doing an even higher level ABC assessment to get people to accept the notion of competition as an important element between where they are now and where they want to be - in what ever way they choose to define winning (i.e. rather than crushing the competition, making people happier, improving lives, discovering something important).

Great feedback and stimulating discussion. Thanks, John

Posted by johnza at November 4, 2004 09:18 PM

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