Winning creates enemies: here's how to stay ahead of them

Winning creates enemies

And those enemies will do anything to get back at you

Including legal stuff

Just ask Phil Knight

When Nike started to properly eat into his biggest competitors market share, they got the US government to change the law to hugely increase the duties Nike was charged

Retroactively

Now Phil reacted

And Phil fought

And he reduced the initial bill down by more than 60%

But the final was still almost 40% of Nike's entire revenue in the year the bill first landed

So CEOs: what can you do?

It's easy and comforting to think of these sorts of enemy attacks as unpredictable distractions from your true mission of driving the business forward

But they're not unpredictable

You don't have to sit back, hope they don't happen, and then react and fight like hell if they do

You can apply pro-active intelligence to your enemies

Because if your enemy can come up with a strategy to attack you, you're perfectly capable of coming up with that strategy yourself

You just have to set some time aside for some fresh thinking

And then make yourself do it

That's why one of the most important questions in my Black Swan threat workshop is this:

"If you were the CEO of our biggest competitors and you were given a blank cheque, how would you attack us to try to bring us down?"

With every leadership team that I've done this threat workshop with, this question always brings out something unexpected that wasn't being considered before

Try it in your next meeting with your Exec Team