You Aren't Guaranteed Leadership
When one side is dominant, we tend to think they’ll always be dominant.
Especially when their dominance is all encompassing - more market share, more money, more resources, more access, more everything. They develop an aura of invincibility. Their people sense it, they exude it, they act it.
And then a curious thing happens. Their customers believe it, and their competitors believe it. And when everyone starts believing it, they act accordingly.
Customers afford the leader a perception of strength, even before they’ve walked in the door. If these guys are the best at what they do, and we aspire to be the best at what we do, then we should be working with them.
The competition also behaves differently. Their headspace becomes occupied by the leader. Their hearts sink when they hear they’re up against them. They tailor their proposals not on their own strengths but with how they counter each one of the leader’s strengths. They effectively become the side show to the main event.
This has been the case with just about every domain, with countries (Great Britain at the turn of the century), companies (General Motors in the first half of the century, Microsoft in the 80’s), and sports teams (Liverpool Football Club in the 80s, the Chicago Bulls in the early 90s).
But as we’ve seen with each of these examples, there’s no such thing as permanent leadership. Every single one relinquished their dominant leadership position for different reasons - many externally-driven but almost all, compounded by internal decisions and actions.
For most, this happened over time, almost imperceptibly. New competition, market disruptions, the loss of key talent, the development of new innovations and new industries, poor internal leadership, a series of bad decisions. This compounded over time until the dominance was gone.
And even then, many found it difficult to accept that the loss of dominance wasn’t anything more than a hiatus. Ask Liverpool supporters, who won the Premier League this season after a 30 year wait. That team was the very definition of dominance back in its day. No one - supporter or otherwise - would have said their next win was anything more than a year or two away, until it wasn’t.
Of course, this doesn’t mean leaders disappear entirely. Many continue to thrive in different ways, perhaps reemerging to become leaders again, just not in the areas or the manner they once were.
But even when that happens, the point remains. Dominance isn’t guaranteed. No matter your resources or your strength, your position can turn - on a dime or slowly over time without many of us even noticing it, unless we’re paying very, very careful attention.
(P.S. Liverpool fans - I promise this post isn’t aimed at your team… ;-))
