Ready, Fire, Aim

Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Second or last, it’s the same thing. I was raised on lines like these, which is why I felt a particular horror watching Talladega Nights hand almost the same tagline to Ricky Bobby: if you ain’t first, you’re last.

On a locker-room wall, or in a pre-game speech, the line is harmless and gets you pumped up. In a business it is a death warrant, and it falls apart the moment you ask one question: who wins?

There is no single number one inside a company, and no single winner in how it runs and prioritises the business. The shareholders want the return, the customers want the thing they were sold, the people doing the work want to understand the why and to know there is a plan worth working towards. Win for one and starve the other two and you have not won anything that lasts.

The honest answer is some mix of the three, and the mix often moves by the quarter. That movement is the case for a real plan, one that holds a direction across years and forces every change in the forecast to be weighed for its impact on the whole thing, not just the line that moved. After a couple of those changes, the plan and the teams become more siloed, and the drift quietly gets worse.

The win-at-all-costs mind never asks who wins. It just wants to be first. You can see it right now in the race to be AI-ready. Everyone wants to be first, every board wants the announcement, and underneath a good number of them the data is rubbish. Being first to build on a broken foundation buys nothing. You have paid to arrive early at the wrong place.

Funnily enough, the same crowd that said AI would replace people is now admitting maybe they cut too many, too fast, and underestimated the impact. The impact was never the priority. Being first and thumping your chest about it was. The market loved the ruthless efficiency because all it saw was the headline, not the work and the tasks that were actually being eliminated.

This is not a case against speed. Speed is fine when there is no ground to check, and for most of life there is none. So “just start” is the right default. You want to get in shape, go to the gym. You want to learn to code or a new language, open the book and start studying. You want to build a website, just do it. Do not plan it to death, do not buy the perfect programme, just go. The starting is most of the battle, and the holding back usually comes from a place of avoidance.

Transformation is the exception, because a transformation is all ground. I have walked into more than one already running on a contradiction nobody had pressure-tested. Start it on a vague or contradictory premise and you do not save the time you skipped. You build technical debt. The contradiction you waved past in the planning room does not vanish, it waits, and it comes due in execution at a worse price than the planning would ever have cost.

The contradiction survives because the room was never as aligned as it looked. When people say they are aligned, they usually mean they are not in each other’s way. That is a truce. Ask everyone to write the plan down on their own and you get different plans back, because a thought you cannot write down is a thought you have not finished. One person goes along for convenience, one does not want to rock the boat, one has an agenda that a soft consensus carries through. Agreement is the thing you can hold a person to. If you cannot hold them to it, the room agreed to nothing.

It gets worse when the people who would know are not in the room at all. A strategy built only by the vision people drifts from what is true on the ground. The doers know the data is rubbish. They know the timeline is a fiction. Nobody asked them, so the deck goes up clean and the gap stays buried until the work drags it into the light.

You will see more need for transformation to adjust to the new normal, and more diligence in what gets delivered, bought, and planned. The cheap capital of the COVID era is finally gone. Every investment is being scrutinised now, the way it should have been in the first place.

The fix is simple. Put the doers in the room with the direction-setters, aim before you fire, and stop calling the skipped step speed. Make sure the people who are responsible and accountable are in the room too, not their direct reports, the ones whose name is on the outcome. Write down the starting position, and check every change for the impact it has on the overall plan.

Simple is not the same as easy. It takes discipline and ruthless alignment. It takes the C-suite to name who leads this, why, and what the outcome has to be. It takes people who treat the work as direct impact on the company and its strategy, not a vanity project to run on the side, people who do not turn up double-booked and unable to make it. Above all it takes absolute focus on one specific outcome that everyone is actually working towards.