The Competitor in the Room

I was in an organizational leadership meeting where we were working on the next budget and planning for the year ahead.

Throughout the day our discussion kept coming back to one organization. The one we saw as our competitor.

It wasn’t a single moment. It was a consistent pattern. What they were doing, what they might do next, how we compared. The more it came up, the more it started to shape the conversation, and the discussion started to follow it.

That night, I kept thinking about the meeting. I had the feeling that we’d lost the purpose of the meeting. Our focus wasn’t on generating ideas of what is best for us, rather it was locked on what our competitor was doing.

The scoreboard isn’t the organization

Sports are zero-sum. On the court, someone wins and someone loses. We grow up understanding that logic, and it’s one of the things that makes competition meaningful.

But somewhere along the way, it’s easy to carry the logic of the game into the logic of the organization.

If they have more teams, we must be losing. If they land the better players, we’ve been beaten. If they’re growing, something must be wrong with us.

That night, what I realized was that sport itself may be zero-sum, but organizational success doesn’t have to be.

You don’t need other organizations to lose in order for you to win.

You do need to deliver an offering that serves the audience you’re building for well enough to attract the number of families you need to be sustainable. That’s the measure. Not whether someone else is smaller, or slower, or fails.

Some of it really is scarce

I don’t want to overstate this. Some things in youth sports are genuinely zero-sum. A facility partnership often only goes to one organization. So do tournament hosting rights. If you’re competing for those, you’re competing.

But those are specific contests inside a much larger effort. They are not the measure of the organization.

You can lose a facility bid and still be succeeding at your mission. You can watch another club grow and still be exactly as good at what you do. We are not limited by the success or failure of our competition.

Knowing what other organizations are doing is useful. Letting them set the agenda isn’t.

Enough, not everything

There’s a harder question underneath, and it’s the one the competitor-focused conversation allowed us to avoid.

Who are we designed to serve? What value do we create for them? And how many families do we actually need in order to do that well and sustain it?

That last question is more important than many leaders think. When your target is the whole market, everyone else’s success feels like your loss. When your target is enough of the right families, it doesn’t.

Once you are working on those questions, the competitor stops being the center. The families you serve become the center. And your best strategy can emerge.

I still think about that meeting.

Not because anyone did anything wrong. We were doing what leaders in competitive environments naturally do. But I remember how much time was spent on an organization that wasn’t in the room, and how little of that time made us better at what we existed to do.

The goal isn’t to beat every other club.

It’s to become the right club for enough of the right people.