How great teams find purpose by picking the right fight

Executive overview

Most teams lack genuine purpose because leaders pick the wrong fight — targeting rivals rather than causes. The result is low motivation, ethical drift, and teams that don't bond.

The fix is to identify a fight worth rallying around: a cause with real stakes, where failure has visible consequences. Three fight types cover most organisations: revolutionary (reject an industry norm), underdog (prove the haters wrong), ally (champion the customer's fight).

The leader's job is not to project a vision and get buy-in — it's to surface what people already believe and put it into words.

Why fighting rivals backfires

• Trash-talking competitors motivates the competitors, not your own team
• Average employees don't identify with "crush Pepsi" — they might work there one day
• Competitive rivalry encourages unethical behaviour when pressure peaks
• Steve Jobs's internal rivalries at Apple drove out co-founder Wozniak and got Jobs fired
• Jobs eventually had to publicly make amends with Microsoft — years of innovation lost to a pointless fight

The three types of fight

Revolutionary fight: Identify something the industry accepts as normal and refuse to accept it.

• Declare what you find unjust; lay out a plan to change it
• Paul O'Neill at Alcoa declared zero accidents — radical when "some risk is acceptable" was the norm
• Every safety improvement also drove efficiency; the rallying cry united frontline workers and executives alike
• Alcoa's valuation went from $3B to $27B over O'Neill's 13-year tenure; revenue grew fivefold
• Pela (formerly Pela Case): "waste-free future" — phone cases that biodegrade in 10 years, not 10,000
• Pela expanded into sunglasses — not the obvious product extension, but the next most-wasted consumer item

Underdog fight: You need a rejection and a rebuttal — being small isn't enough without a plan.

• Blockbuster laughed Netflix out of Dallas when Netflix tried to sell for $50M
• Netflix turned that rejection into a permanent rallying cry; they've framed every subsequent move (streaming, original content, awards) as proving the establishment wrong
• Research shows underdog narratives produce more creative problem-solving and faster results in negotiations
• Underdogs win by going around the rules, not through them — David didn't engage Goliath hand-to-hand

Ally fight: Make everyone aware they are fighting for the customer, not just serving a function.

• Kaiser Permanente's "I saved a life" campaign: receptionists booking preventative screenings get credited as life-savers
• Electronic health records let any staff member spot overdue screenings — not just doctors
• Celebrates the people furthest from the patient (admin, assistants) who rarely see the impact of their work
• Pro-social motivation — being moved to help others — only fires when you can see the person you're helping; the ally fight makes that visible across the whole organisation

Superordinate goals: the bonding mechanism

• A superordinate goal is too large for any one team to achieve alone — it requires tearing down silos
• The Robbers Cave experiment: rival boys' camps only stopped fighting when given a shared problem neither group could solve alone
• Gates always kept computing's larger mission in view; Jobs repeatedly got distracted by market-share rivalries
• Andrew Jackson unified merchants, freed slaves, Choctaw warriors, and pirates to defend New Orleans in 1812 — the most diverse fighting force of its era, bonded purely by a shared threat
• When the fight ends, the bonding dissolves — leaders must keep renewing the cause or name the next one

Finding and articulating the fight

• Leaders often believe they're leading a revolution; what matters is whether it resonates with the people they lead
• Start by asking: what does this team already stand for? Then find the words for it
• Even internal teams can pick a mini-revolution: "every other team skips personal connection — we don't"
• Every metric gains meaning when it ties back to the fight — sales volume at Pela = landfill waste prevented
• When the fight is right, Monday morning meetings shift from hitting percentages to tracking impact