Francis Wade | ‘We’re No. 1’ – a useless, fading goal

In times past it was fashionable for corporate leaders to craft vision statements with commitments to be ‘No. 1’ and ‘world-class’. Lately, these have become less popular, with good reason. They are a sign of lacklustre thinking, which signals a lack of detailed planning.

Corporate leaders tend to fit a particular profile. They show strong Type A tendencies: energetic overachievers who are time-sensitive and impatient. They drive themselves hard to accomplish great things, often bringing others behind them for the ride, ready or not.

However, if you have this trait, there may be an added one that gets you in trouble: your tendency to be competitive. If you get a lot of juice from beating other people, this approach works when goals are simple. It stirs up lots of extra effort and leads to reliable, continuous improvements.

Most CEOs use this characteristic to grab the corner office ahead of others, at which point they often shift their focus to defeating other companies. This compulsion to be the captain of a winning team creates three kinds of problems.

1. CEOs play games employees find irrelevant

Part of being an effective executive involves learning the language of the C-Suite. Over time, this new lingo separates leaders from lower-level employees.

But the big problem is that what excites you, a type-A executive, is unlikely to inspire others. While staff knows there is a connection between operating profit or EBITDA and their job security, it’s all a theory. Certainly, they feel no emotional bond.

As such, when you conduct a town-hall session, you’re likely to speak glowingly of achievements in words that don’t resonate. Your staff’s needs are far more human, and it’s easy to lose track of them.

To build engagement, you’ll need to uncover employees’ actual aspirations in order to satisfy them. For example, if getting their kids a decent education and making ends meet is a major part of their lives, you must start there.

2. CEOs craft imaginary competitions

The world is changing so rapidly that the old ways of thinking about competitors have become stale. In the past it was easier: ultra-competitive CEOs would find similar companies to compare themselves against. Then, they would choose metrics such as profitability, stock price, or revenue to be their yard-stick of accomplishment.

However, in a fast-changing landscape, your ‘competitors’ are actually imaginary: made up. As industries and circumstances evolve, it becomes impossible to find other companies that are just like yours. There may be some overlap but no perfect fit. Your orange ends up racing to a make-believe finish line against their apple.

As such, your claims to be or plans to become No. 1 are increasingly empty. They are a simplistic way to motivate yourself that may suit you, as a type-A executive, but no one else.

Even aspirations to claim a world-class standard look silly in today’s world. Anyone who cares can achieve this goal by defining a narrow standard. But even then, customers don’t care about such claims.

3. CEOs forsake customers

While most MBA programmes are built around competition, that approach is becoming a distraction – at best a sideshow. It’s far better to develop a sharper focus on meeting customers’ unmet needs.

But this is no solid target. Customers’ needs are evolving due to new technologies, so it’s become harder than ever to discover a customer’s ‘jobs to be done’. The term refers to the actions a customer takes to meet their unmet needs.

The pandemic has led to shifts in many customers’ jobs-to-be-done, as they adopted new behaviour patterns. Many companies unwittingly fell out of touch, and have not re-established a unique understanding. They run the risk of missing the mark.

Just observe the way Uber and Airbnb disrupted their respective industries before the pandemic. They used modern technology to tap into idle, low-cost resources, that is, people’s cars and rooms. Now, they are shifting their processes to accommodate the new customer need for sanitised environments.

In short, they have been adjusting their companies’ business models in concert with changes in their customers’ needs.

There are other ways your company can meet unmet needs, but when it happens, don’t be confused by your success. Definitely don’t claim it as proof of being No. 1 or world- class to start a new round of chest-beating.

Instead, use it as fuel to fire up a fresh cycle of customer research, which in the end, is the best insurance policy against disruptions of all kinds.

- Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To receive a Summary of Links to past columns, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com