Pick A Worthy Rival!

I’ve been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember. I played little league for a few years and thought I had real potential. I could do everything except run, hit, and catch! Well, I guess that doesn’t leave all that much does it…

My great-uncle taught me a love for the game. And since he was a huge fan of the Boston Red Sox, I was too. Even as I child, I remember recognizing just how bitter the rivalry was between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees - and that rivalry often carried over between their fans too!

Looking back on that rivalry, I always viewed it as a competition to win the American League East and hopefully even the World Series each year; both very finite goals. If you follow baseball at all, you know that the first 25 years or so that I was cheering on the Red Sox were filled with utter disappointment…

Here’s what I never recognized since I viewed that rivalry from the perspective of a fan who wanted his team to win it all: while there was certainly competition between the two teams to beat one another each time they met and to win the division each season, both very finite objectives, that rivalry contributed to both teams being far better over the course of their histories than they may have ever been otherwise! And it played quite the role in building a loyal fan base for both teams too…

In the last blog, I shared my belief that Cindy and I deliver the most value available to each client we serve. I also commented on feeling like our LIVE2LEAD:Harrisonburg event is indeed the absolute best leadership development experience offered in Virginia each year. Then I made a statement about who I viewed as our primary competition; ourselves!

As we’ve learned to play the infinite game of ongoing and intentional personal and professional development over the last few years, so that we can continue on a daily basis to improve on our own previous best, we’ve had to learn the importance of knowing when to compare ourselves to others and when not to… In The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek suggests a change in mindset from constantly viewing others in our industry as competition to looking for other great organizations that we can view as worthy rivals!

Sinek provides some outstanding examples and a very thorough explanation for what he views as the importance of a worthy rival. For the sake of time here, I’ll just share this short snippet:

“A Worthy Rival is another player in the game worthy of comparison… We don’t need to admire everything about them, agree with them or even like them. We simply acknowledge that they have strengths and abilities from which we could learn a thing or two.”

Over the long haul, that rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees served to make them both better organizations. I’d have to guess that it also generated a gob of revenue for them both as well… With that difference between a competitor and a worthy rival in mind, who have you typically viewed as your main competitor in a win/lose business scenario that you may do well to begin considering as a worthy rival you can learn from and build a stronger business in the process?

In the next blog, we’ll take a look at a shift we can each make that will serve us extremely well as we move from a finite to an infinite approach!