Chapter X: Champion
How values like the search for challenge, curiosity, and selflessness enable anyone to champion others and outfit them for the path ahead.
“The key is not the ‘will to win’…everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.”
— Bobby Knight1
What will I learn in this chapter?
Congratulations — you’re in the home stretch having read all but this final chapter of Missionary + Mercenary!
You’ve earned the privilege of becoming the champion of your own story as you’ve learned how to apply all the lessons of the prior chapters. You may even become one to others when you can champion another’s cause and outfit them for the path ahead. You might have the will to win, but do you have the willingness to be tested, tried, and proven worthy of elevating to the next level?
Here are your key takeaways:
Champions see competition less as an opportunity for victory over rivals than as a chance to defeat their last best performance. A champion sees a competitor as a gift — the best way they’ll ever find to strive to become better themselves. Champions are constantly pushing the limits of their endeavor, their teammates, and especially themselves to break through whatever limits confront them to discover the next plateau of possibility.
Just as a baby chick must struggle to emerge from its shell, champions must rock the proverbial boat to test its seaworthiness. Champions know any confidence their stakeholders, teammates, or they themselves might have is false until it’s been tested.
Champions are not made from innate ability or learned skill, although both are advantageous. Champions are the result of adhering to the values that enable consistent preparation and elevation of performance by prioritizing how they make decisions. Specifically, you’ll learn how the values of Insatiable Curiosity, Authentic Selflessness, and Worthy Challenge align to the chisel tip perspectives of Control Factor Theory.
Champions must endure challenges of their own to gain genuine confidence in their abilities when put to the test in the real world. This is why all champions train every chance they get. They simulate the conditions they’re likely to encounter to develop a version of “muscle memory” that empowers actions and reactions to be more autonomic than deliberate.
Since we’re never ready for everything, our willingness to be tested helps discover what more we need to prepare for. Champions simply try to be qualified to handle the current challenge and always ready to train for the next one.
Trials shouldn’t be avoided any more than friction should be. Trials are the blessings that put champions to the test. You’ll discover this through the stories of real people — as well as a couple fictitious ones — with names like Bailey, Griswold, Lutnick, Biles, Stewart, Phelps, Child, Christie, and Aldrin. All of these characters were tested by trials and transformed by a shock of some kind. Not all trials or tests lead to this transformative shock, but every champion is ready to exploit it when it does.
Our own personal stories exemplify times when champion values were indwelled in us. These include Derek’s first SCIP conference and seeing a keynote by one of his all-time favorite coaches, Arik racing a nearly-naked egg delivery man to the top of one of Asia’s most sacred mountains, touring the home of one of rock and roll’s most iconic artists mere months after his death, and playing a summertime card game to 50,000 points. It also includes the unexpected loss of our parents that helped us rediscover each other and tackle the next few decades putting Aurora to the test.
Redemption is the key to your own personal apotheosis, but you don’t earn it by worrying whether others are pleased or impressed by your performance. Most people diffuse their force by trying to please everyone. But champions concentrate their force by narrowing the range of stakeholders they serve as much as possible. As the story of Spartacus will show you, this can lead revolutions, topple empires, and help you answer the two most important questions of your life: Who are you trying to impress, and who are you trying to please?
Performance plateaus are frustrating, but they force human beings to rest, recover, and reorient before they elevate to the next challenge. Plateaus buy us time to reflect, repent, and reconcile with those around us as we join our endeavors together. Redemption is impossible without plateaus. Champion athletes know it’s never the workout, but their recovery that elevates performance.
Confidence never comes from the praise or adoration of others. It comes from having the will to be tested. Champions know, without the test, any confidence is false and could render them vulnerable to imposter syndrome — or worse yet, being exposed as a fraud. The path to this willingness is your commitment to the principles behind the Treble Values.
Doctrine and Tradecraft
Becoming a champion is not about winning a competition. It’s about defeating yesterday’s self.
Your own worst enemy isn’t some rival seeking the same goals and aspirations at your expense. Rather, it’s your own complacency to push beyond the self-imposed limits holding you back from your best performance. The relentless pursuit of perfection just discussed at the conclusion of the Supercycle defines performance based on the expectations of your stakeholders. They depend on you — their champion — to represent their interests and achieve on their behalf what they never could alone.
Competition simply reveals who’s best in a set of near-equals. Becoming the best among your peers is the by-product of being the best version of yourself in serving the interests of those who’ve asked you to stand in for them as their substitute.
This competitive advantage is the result of hewing to values rather than relying on learned skills or in-born natural abilities. That’s also why anyone can use those values to become a champion themselves.
Innovation and strategy experts have noted during the last half-century’s transition from Jay Barney’s Resource-Based View (RBV) to more modern inventories of competitive advantage like RPV Theory that resources and processes are largely imitable by competitors.2,3,4 Values, however, are not!
Resources, processes, and values (RPV) describe the methods by which organizations transform assets into offers. Values are systems of belief and must be based on deep cultural appreciation for what works and what doesn’t under different circumstances. Values are simply the way all humans prioritize decision-making. We hope we have given you that background in describing the relationship between your inner Missionary + Mercenary.
Understanding how values work for you will enable you to prioritize every decision you make for the rest of your life.
Three specific values align to the three phases of the Supercycle. We call these the Treble Values:
Insatiable curiosity is the process of Discovery, where the boundaries of your landscape contain everything you’ll need to concern yourself with — and nothing you don’t — to handle anything you might encounter.
Authentic selflessness achieves Optimality only by putting the interests of those you serve ahead of your own, aligning whatever you have to offer with the superiority criteria they’ll reward you for.
Worthy challenge puts your conjecture to the test in Simulation by revealing all your potential mistakes — before you make them — so you can plan out how to act and react.
Figure 15: The Treble Values align your Missionary + Mercenary mindsets with Supercycle control factors and their associated mission, filters, and analytic yield.
The Mercenary is unlikely to ever enjoy being insatiably curious, just like the Missionary is never going to seek out a worthy challenge. The trick to mastering the balancing act is to find and practice authentic selflessness as much as possible as we flex between curiosity and challenge. Every situation has a perfect ratio that can only be calibrated when we put someone — or something — ahead of ourselves.
The most authentically selfless thing you can ever do is to act — in secret — on behalf of someone else. If they never know it's you who helped them, it’s between you and your Creator.
These three key values are equally important and integral for the champion to instill in themselves to be their own best version when they next take the field. Combined together with friction among your teammates, the champion is regarded as having near-superhuman abilities to accomplish things nobody else can dream of. When the rest of the team learns to inspire in themselves those same values, your aspirations become unstoppable.
Think back to elementary school. You would’ve been content to spend the day on the playground, oblivious to the mystery of mathematics. Your primary school teacher, however, started you out learning addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division, so that arithmetic was the foundation for your studies in future years, progressing to algebra, geometry, calculus, and more. Alongside math, they surely taught you some science, social studies, music, art, reading, and other subjects.
Whether you knew it then or can appreciate it only now, your teacher was one of your first champions, building on similar developmental work a parent or guardian started at home. They saw what you needed to learn to navigate the world, helped you figure out how to pay attention to the relevant topics and ignore the distractions, showed you how to make friends and deal with bullies, and worked with you to build strategies and goals so you could succeed in your own way.
Day after day, they came into the classroom prepared to tackle new lessons. They gave you practice exams so you could understand what would happen when you were tested with the real thing and guided you through experiments in controlled ways. They often sacrificed their own time and money to make sure you had what you needed to learn.
Like teachers, every champion — whether in the competitive intelligence business, your family at home, or as a neighbor in your community — helps their stakeholders overcome gnarly obstacles and meet achievable targets. Champions are willing to stand in for their stakeholders when a substitute is necessary, and they have a knack for noticing and closing the knowledge stochasm in innovative ways. Champions inspire people to take deliberate steps toward mastery and aspire to win through superiority with empathy and guile.
But what truly defines the champion is that they are never satisfied enough to stop preparing for the next confrontation. As soon as they help achieve the goal stakeholders are working for, they immediately position themselves at the ready to journey through the Discovery-Optimality-Simulation Supercycle all over again. Both Missionary + Mercenary see the world this way, and they’re always on the lookout for a certain level of under-certainty that can or must be defeated with confident action. They persistently play out scenarios with stakeholders using a simple, repeatable formula that soon becomes familiar.
This gritty, repetitive persistence is where many, unfortunately, miss the mark. You might journey through the full process of Discovery, Optimality, and Simulation and think you are done or have nowhere else to go.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Yes, you can and should celebrate when you reach the end of any particular milestone, goal, or set of obstacles. But if you don’t habitually start the sequence again with something new, the best you’ve done is prove to yourself that you could handle that single circumstance. Persistence is a habit made by practicing.
When a police officer is done responding to a call, they don’t simply go home. They get back in their vehicle, keep the scanner on, and get ready to respond to the next call for help. Military personnel function in a similar way, completing one tour and then starting another. Your elementary school teacher didn’t teach one math class and assume you were ready for calculus. They planned the next lesson, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Your teacher knew how much math you could handle and when to stop pushing you forward. But only you know your own real limits because only you can test them to the breaking point. Sometimes, we’re our own worst enemy and stand in the way of forward progress by refusing to put ourselves to the test.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— Sun Tzu5
Consider how authentic confidence drives leadership. The highest calling of a champion is to lead stakeholders through ambiguous circumstances. When a sports team is confronting an unbeaten opponent or a battleship is going to war against a possibly superior navy, the team or crew looks to their captain to find stability and clarity. The confidence of the champion helps them gauge how much confidence they should have themselves, even if only through faith in their leader’s experience and the wisdom of their direction.
If you’re never put to the test, confidence in your authority will never be as strong as it could be if you’d survived a trial or tribulation. Getting to the top of any field requires us to seek out ways to be tested, over and over again. Rather than avoid being put to the test, champions constantly seek out benchmarks to demonstrate — if only to themselves — their continuous improvement.
What’s the opposite of confidence you’ve earned? False confidence. “Fake it ‘til you make it” might work some of the time, but it’s not a consistent way to allocate scarce resources to ensure a return-on-investment for stakeholders. Faking it is particularly frowned upon by the stakeholders who’ve financed your innovation or endeavor expecting your experience and wisdom will ensure success.
Imposter syndrome is often described as a lack of confidence that we have earned a particular role or position with which we’ve been entrusted. It can happen because, even though we might be qualified, we’re operating in a new set of circumstances where our abilities haven’t been tested before. It can also emerge because — in our past, especially in childhood — someone was cruel enough to point out that we weren’t deserving of a particular honor or responsibility.
When given something we haven’t proven ourselves worthy of, it’s not unusual to feel like a fraud.
Imposter syndrome can also strike because we somehow obtained our authority and the implied respect of other stakeholders without earning it. This happens when we’re granted power through deceit or inheritance rather than merit. When we recognize the gravity of the situation, we might find ways to diminish our right to occupy a role that we’ve received. Is it possible we’ve been endowed with an authority simply because no one else wanted it?
If you’re experiencing imposter syndrome, you must ask yourself if it’s because you really are an imposter. Did you somehow bypass your trial-by-fire to win your position? The answer might be difficult to confront. But if you discover you actually are an imposter, you’ve got some choices to make.
Although your group may still lack another willing and qualified person, the most honorable thing you can do is voluntarily offer to resign until you possess the necessary qualifications and confidence. They can always turn down your resignation and encourage you to rise to meet the challenge.
If you lack the humility to step aside, you might end up squandering the next opportunity when people trust you with their capital or invest something else of value. Although the business world strongly suggests that winners never back down, surrender is better and more ethical than to risk letting your incompetence damage those who trusted you. Plus, you’ll never learn your lesson until you do.
Your other option is to allow yourself to be tested so you can earn the right to retain the position you’ve been given. This is a scary concept because you know you didn’t have what it takes to win when you got there. But, what if you’ve been able to build the necessary abilities on the job?
Will you ever know you’re a champion if you’ve never been put to the test?
More than one leader has trod this path, taking higher-level positions before they truly felt ready, only to go on to laudable success. In fact, 68 percent of CEOs assert they weren’t prepared for the job.6 Many leadership experts now advise applying for jobs even if you’re not a perfect fit. Their rationale is that employers aren’t looking for perfect candidates; they expect people to learn and develop in the positions they’re hired into.7
Harvard’s Gautam Mukunda researched how “filtered” leaders got their roles through normal career progressions, compared with “unfiltered” leaders who came in as outsiders or through fluke circumstances. The unfiltered leaders were both the least and most effective, while filtered leaders occupied the middle of the pack.
This is explained by the high-risk, high-reward nature of unfiltered leaders. As Mukunda cautions, the same traits that make them great can also lead to frequent problems. Filtered leaders may be less adaptable, but their stability is often exactly what circumstances demand.8
Unfiltered leaders are naturally more skeptical of their ability. They align more closely with the attitude of a champion, so they need to be challenged. Champions have a nagging anxiety, understanding there’s always a higher level of performance to strive for, even when they’re doing their best. They find it easier to exercise humility because they know they will always be learning and trying to break through to the next plateau.
By contrast, filtered leaders can become overconfident because their circumstances are too familiar. But both filtered and unfiltered leaders must be tested to prove they are capable of succeeding if they want to feel truly confident in maintaining the role with which they’ve been entrusted. It is through being tested that they discover what they’re truly capable of.
“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent — no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” — Seneca9
The reality that champions don’t always win their battles is important to remember. The suffering we experience as a result of failure can trick us into thinking we’re not a champion, when in fact we are. As Simon Sinek puts it, “Champions are not the ones who always win races — champions are the ones who get out there and try. And try harder the next time. And even harder the next time. 'Champion' is a state of mind. They are devoted. They compete to best themselves as much if not more than they compete to best others.”10
The Missionary is much more tolerant of the infinite than the Mercenary is. The Mercenary only has today, not eternity. On the battlefield and in life, the Mercenary might win the day, but only the Missionary has the patience to win the war.
Stakeholders unable or unwilling to get results for themselves must have faith in their champion’s Mercenary abilities to entrust that the champion will achieve the collectively desired outcome. Yet, those results manifest largely because the champion’s Missionary has enough faith in the justness of the cause to do something worthwhile. In this way, the pragmatic serves the idyllic.
Champions are more than mere victors in how they view competition. Victors are all about beating competitors who are seeking the same scarce resources, opportunities, or results. As Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation, paraphrased Genghis Khan’s philosophy, “It’s not enough that I win. Someone else must also lose.”11,12
Champions are not perfect — no one who ever makes a mistake can be. Although they’re unwilling to cut corners, champions try not to let perfect be the enemy of great, as Craig Fleisher frequently reminds us. Champions apply the rules 100 percent of the time, and imperfection is tolerated only under two specific circumstances: if they’re experimenting with something new and don’t yet know what perfect looks like; or, when it would be foolish to act at all because they have no real knowledge of what to do next.
Clayton Christensen presents a real-life heuristic of human discernment for when champions can or cannot tolerate imperfection. While studying in England, Christensen played on the varsity basketball team for his university. A deeply devout Mormon, he’d made a promise to God not to play on Sundays. His faith had led him to honor the Sabbath and set aside Sundays for worship and rest.
When his team made it to the championship game, it was scheduled for a Sunday. His coach and teammates pleaded with him to bend his rule “just this once” and play the game anyway. But Christensen didn’t bend. Looking back, Christensen insisted the decision was one of the most important of his life. “It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time,” he writes. “The boundary — your personal moral line — is powerful because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you from doing it again.”13
Because athletes continually challenge themselves in training, they also enjoy returning over and over again to any field of competition. Sometimes, they’ll even seek challengers in sports they don’t specialize in. Athletes thrive on empathy, drawing energy from the crowd and creating a deep connection between themselves and the fans in the stands. They sincerely want others to feel how they feel by enjoying the spectacle of their sport played at the highest level.
Meanwhile, spectators get to live vicariously watching their favorite athletes in competition. We get to imagine what it’s like to catch the winning touchdown — or have a buzzer-beating three-point shot circle the rim of the basket only to fall outside, crushing hopes of triumph with the agony of defeat.
All athletes want to leave the field victorious, but a champion is mainly out to best themselves. They are never satisfied with the current level they’re playing at, however elite. Invigorated by and perpetually wondering about the breaking point of their limits, they seek to elevate their performance expectations to a new level. They use humility to fight the Alpha psychology of presumed superiority, and they never assume that what they did yesterday will continue to be good enough to outperform the next rival.
We’ve noticed the best intelligence professionals are the ones who seek out friction. They appreciate that iron sharpens iron. They refuse to perform to the expectations of their stakeholders. Champions hold themselves to a higher standard than anyone who might be watching them.
Recall Darwin Smith from Chapter 6: Humility and what the longtime Kimberly-Clark CEO said at his retirement: “I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.” When you make others’ expectations your yardstick, you’ll always fall short of your potential.
Applied Case Examples
George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life exemplifies championing the cause of everyone around him as he lived out the Treble Values. As a boy, George saved his drowning brother, going partially deaf in the process. Later, he saved the druggist from a fatal error that would have cost someone their life.
Finally, George was in a position to save the Building & Loan in Bedford Falls, but only after taking over for his father who died of a stroke. This led to George getting “stuck” in Bedford Falls instead of going on to college. He even gave up traveling the world so he could help save others — twice! But it wasn’t until the end of the movie, after he was accused of various misdeeds, that the townspeople rallied around George as he was humbled enough to accept that he couldn’t save himself.
George tapped the brakes at the Building & Loan to keep the townspeople from spinning out of control when he noticed a run on the bank. He canceled his honeymoon with Mary, who took the lead herself when she offered up their savings as a way to sustain the townspeople while the bank was closed. George’s depositors — his financiers — only needed enough of their cash to get by until the bank reopened in a week. And Mary’s offer of their honeymoon savings avoided everyone taking a 50 percent hit from George’s rich, narcissistic business rival, Henry Potter.
As a boy, George walked into a meeting at the Building & Loan just as Potter was calling his Missionary father, Peter, a “miserable failure,” prompting George to chastise the old miser.14 The significance of that moment becomes especially clear later when Clarence helps George through his suicide crisis, punctuated by his note that no one is a failure if they have friends.
George’s father described Potter as a “sick man, frustrated, sick in his mind, sick in his soul, if he has one — he hates everybody that has anything that he can’t have.”15 In truth, Peter Bailey’s Missionary lacked the Mercenary instincts to succeed in business, while Potter’s Mercenary lacked the Missionary heart for reaching out to others. Both men were too extreme in their commitment to their own nature.
The tension between George’s Missionary father, Peter, and Potter’s Mercenary is the same tension inside of you, too. The reason we wrote the book you’ve been reading is because there aren’t enough years ahead for us to risk you discovering the Missionary + Mercenary balancing act on your own. Even though we probably don’t know you personally, we feel deeply called to champion your cause and equip you for the path ahead.
George’s mistaken belief that the world would be better off if he’d never lived puts on full display what can happen when we fail to balance the twin mindsets. Potter’s greed lacked a winning aspiration that included anyone except himself. Peter’s overly generous just cause made it impossible for him to multiply his impact on others. George struggled mightily as Clarence guided him through a simulated world where he never existed. But the terror he felt when he saw that outcome finally induced his redemption by seeing both Old Man Potter and his beloved father, Peter, in himself.
George was able to humble himself enough to accept that others were also championing his cause. He couldn’t bear the burden all alone, and when he was shown how others were so grateful for him, he willingly let them shoulder that burden together.
Envious antagonists suffering from a Missionary deficit are often able to learn and grow. When this kind of growth happens in a strict Mercenary, reconciliation becomes possible. Before reconciliation, however, recognition of their mistake is required. The more shocking that recognition, the greater the redemption potential to fix it. Just think of Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol! It took a host of ghosts to shock him awake.
We see this in another Christmas classic, the 1989 holiday comedy National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The boss, Frank Shirley (Brian Doyle-Murray), gets to experience this type of transformation in a way that Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life does not.
One of Mr. Shirley’s employees, Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), had been trying to be his family’s champion by giving everyone a Christmas to remember. Unfortunately, he suffered setbacks at every attempt. Finally, Mr. Shirley cuts employee bonuses and gives Clark a one-year subscription to the jelly-of-the-month club. Having already spent his anticipated bonus on a swimming pool, Clark loses his cool. His cousin-in-law, Eddie (Randy Quaid), takes Clark’s frustrated rant too literally and decides to kidnap Mr. Shirley and deliver him to Clark.
Mrs. Shirley helps her husband realize how his greedy decision has hurt all of his loyal employees — exemplified by Clark and his stricken family. Mr. Shirley not only restores the bonus (plus 20 percent from the previous year), but also declines to press charges after much of Clark’s house is destroyed by a SWAT team’s rescue mission.16
Most people would love to see conflicts resolved and relationships restored. But in real life, it’s incredibly difficult for increasingly arrogant, narcissistic human beings to change that way on their own. You must be aware of this difficulty as an innovator and champion yourself because a foe is often the biggest obstacle in your path. Reconciliation can remove that obstacle so you can take action, but it might not come without significant effort and sacrifice. Done right, however, reconciling with enemies can have the happy side effect of making many new friends and allies in the process.
Reconciliation is the result of choosing to turn away from selfishly hostile intentions and actions. Another word for this is repentance. Repentance is possible when, in humility and empathy, a person understands how they have negatively influenced others and feels authentic remorse about it. This remorse is what creates the resolve to change their ways.
Mr. Shirley is able to repent and reconcile with Clark and his family because he can grasp how they feel and appreciate Clark’s contribution to his own success. Mr. Potter, by contrast, is so consumed by his narcissism and selfishness that it is impossible for him to feel any guilt or remorse for his behavior. Potter is lost and repentance is no longer possible because he regards those around him as less deserving than he is.
Mr. Shirley, on the other hand, uses empathy to find a way to finally put others ahead of himself. The choice to repent is fundamental to human free will and must be accompanied by the same kind of shock Scrooge experienced to upset their personal status quo. Mr. Shirley’s kidnapping by Eddie was just the shock he needed. Potter had no such awakening and still believed he did everything right.
Nobody wants to endure these kinds of shocking wake-up calls in real life. But if the shock that shakes you awake is to be avoided in reality, then you must choose to experience it in Simulation.
The entire premise of It’s A Wonderful Life is that the younger Bailey gets a chance to see what life would be like if he had never been born. He gets to simulate a reality that might have been, but which he could never appreciate or understand without experiencing how shocking it might feel in real life. Through that simulation, George comes to understand exactly what’s at stake — if he were gone, life would be monumentally worse for everyone in his former life. With that understanding, George is equipped to take a different action (continuing to live) than the one he would have taken otherwise (ending his life).
The benefit of simulation — a change of heart — is the same for you and your stakeholders as it was for George. The experience of seeing what might happen if you act differently goes beyond rational logic and helps you grasp what’s at stake on a much deeper, emotional level. It enables not only preparation of the self, but also an understanding of all the things that could go wrong and how others might either lift you up or cause you to stumble. Both of those elements together empower more consistent achievement of desired results.
Champions like George Bailey exist in the real world across a range of disciplines and industries. Each of them demonstrates the core values of insatiable curiosity, worthy challenge, and authentic selflessness in a way that’s distinctly their own. Their demonstration of the Treble Values highlights the truth that their service and contributions are irreplaceable.
Yours can be, too! Because no one else can advocate for others in the same way you can, you must not abandon your distinct opportunities to make a difference under the notion that someone else will do the job.
How do people like Howard Lutnick, Simone Biles, Martha Stewart, Michael Phelps, Julia Child, Agatha Christie, and Buzz Aldrin all demonstrate the champion’s Treble Values in unique ways?
From the beginning of his leadership, Howard Lutnick, CEO of global brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, explored how new innovations could keep the company ahead of financial industry trends. He took eSpeed, an electronic trading system, public in 1999. When tragedy struck in 2001 with the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Howard lost all the employees who had gone in person to the company’s New York office — 70 percent of the total workforce — including his brother, Gary.
But he leveraged earlier technological investments by Cantor Fitzgerald and accepted the risk of first-time business debt to rebuild the company. Lutnick established the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund to support not only those affected by 9/11, but also victims of other acts of terrorism, natural disasters, and emergencies. As of 2024, the fund has distributed roughly $300 million to individuals and families.17,18 Lutnick’s business remains a leader in the financial technology space.
Gymnast Simone Biles began her career at just 6 years old after bouncing in and out of foster care. By age 14, young Simone was competing at the elite level. Throughout training and competitions, she experimented and challenged the system that encouraged gymnasts to perfect traditional skills. Could she do another twist? What would it take to get more height? Simone’s drive for new combinations that pushed her to the edge led to several eponymous skills that equipped her to win competitions multiple points ahead of her nearest competitors.
But at the 2020 Olympics, following the 2018 sexual abuse scandal involving Team USA doctor Larry Nassar, Biles struggled with a physiological phenomenon known as “the twisties.” Citing both safety and mental health concerns, she withdrew from events. The move opened the door for greater conversation around mental health in athletics. Biles took the time to recover and returned to the sport in a big way, reclaiming her world champion title in 2023. She then earned four new Olympic medals in 2024 and became the most decorated U.S. gymnast in history. She publicly supported her peers and displayed outstanding sportsmanship by bowing down in praise with Jordan Chiles to their friend, floor gold medalist Rebeca Andrade.19,20,21
Throughout her career, Martha Stewart constantly questioned how to turn skills into profit, working as a model, stockbroker, caterer, author, and TV host before founding her own media empire, Martha Stewart Omnimedia. But in 2004, after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused her of insider trading, she was found guilty of obstruction of justice, making false statements to investigators, and conspiracy. Martha was sentenced in 2004 to five months in prison, to be followed by home confinement.
But Stewart took interest in her fellow inmates. She taught them new skills as she learned new ones herself, and she served as a liaison between prisoners and the guards. When Stewart’s incarceration was over, she spoke transparently about her experience and made a public apology. She then embarked on a massive comeback campaign, striking deals with companies like PetSmart and Home Depot.
Perhaps Stewart’s smartest decision was to get back on TV, which culminated in a cooking show with Snoop Dogg. People could see her more relaxed and street-smart persona. Her audience appreciated that she seemed more relatable and was not, in fact, perfect. She continues to find new ways to connect with those loyal to her brand with partnerships and products, even in one of the favorite product categories of her new BFF Snoop — the cannabis industry.22,23,24
When Michael Phelps — the most decorated Olympian in history — took to the pool as a kid, it was mainly because his mom wanted to find an outlet for his excess energy. Initially, he didn’t even want to be there, caused trouble, and was afraid of the water. But once young Michael figured out how to maneuver and started winning races, the question of how to get to the top of the podium consumed him. The “kid with a discipline problem” developed one of the most renowned work ethics in athletic history, collaborating with coaches to figure out science-based regimens that would improve his strength and speed. He mastered the art of visualization and contingency planning but didn’t just picture himself achieving success. He mentally imagined overcoming worst-case scenarios, too, so he was inoculated from stressing out during races.
But every time Phelps met bigger goals, he’d experience a crash. These left him unsure how to live without the competitive intensity of his life in the pool and new barriers to break. On the edge of suicide, he finally sought therapy to understand what was behind his emotional patterns and get them under control. His experience led him to open up to interviewers about his mental health struggles. Today, Phelps helps other athletes who are struggling, working with groups such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the Michael Phelps Foundation to provide stress management programming. He describes the emotions he feels through that work as being “light years better than winning the Olympic gold medal.”25,26,27,28,29
At 6’2”, the young Julia Child was better known in school for sports like basketball than for cooking. As part of a privileged family that employed a cook at home, she hadn’t grown up watching anyone prepare meals in the kitchen. Julia hoped at first to become a writer, and she had a thirst to explore and understand the world. She blended her interests in travel and communications, joining the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, precursor of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) during WWII. While working in Sri Lanka, Julia met her future husband, Paul Child, who worked for the State Department and was posted to France.
In Rouen, Child dined at La Couronne, an experience she described as “opening up the soul and spirit for me.” She enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and challenged the notion that women should only cook in domestic kitchens. Child soon met Simca Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who wanted to write a French cookbook for Americans. She became their collaborator, testing recipes and keeping meticulous notes.
After ten long years of toil, the trio published Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book earned Child an invitation to appear on WGBH Boston’s I’ve Been Reading television program, where she made an omelet. Her quirky manner in the kitchen, combined with her quest for perfection and detail, made sophisticated French cuisine accessible. Her cooking shows and future cookbooks became sensations. Although food tastes changed through the decades, Child never stopped supporting new chefs or making their work more visible to the public. Her kitchen, now on display at the Smithsonian Institution, remains a testament to Child’s culinary revolution.30,31,32,33
Fueled by her mother’s fantastic storytelling, Agatha Christie spent most of her childhood wrapped in play with imaginary friends. When the family rented out their property due to money problems and went to France, Agatha took it in stride — moving from different hotels was exciting, and she happily embraced French culture. By the time she was 18, Agatha was already writing short stories. Her mother sought to help her snare a husband — and financial security — by introducing her to society in Cairo, Egypt. She returned to England tentatively engaged to her friend Reginald Lucy. But she was attracted to the “excitement of a stranger” and instead married Archie Christie after a whirlwind courtship.
The difficulties of WWI meant Christie and her husband spent little time together. But her imagination was captured by the experiences and information she gained as a nurse and dispensary. How might a villain use this as poison? Is the face of her story’s hero among the refugees of war? Christie crafted The Mysterious Affair at Styles, unleashing fictional detective Hercule Poirot on the world. She traveled with Archie across the entire British Empire, and her work caught the attention of publisher John Lane, who contracted her for future books.
But as her professional work matured, she suffered the threefold setbacks of requiring psychiatric care, divorcing Archie, and grieving her dear mother’s death. Her fresh start came in 1930 when she met and married archaeologist Max Mallowan. She helped out at his digs, and a consistent travel routine kept Christie’s inspiration flowing. She wrote books and plays throughout WWII, when she once again worked as a dispensary while the need for escapist entertainment was so great.
After the war, Christie’s work drew additional commissions, with Queen Mary’s birthday radio play The Mousetrap being the most famous. She became the best-selling novelist of all time, and her books made their way to radio, film, and television, selling more than two billion English and translated copies. Writers across many genres continue to hold up Christie’s 66 novels, 14 short story collections, and more than 20 plays as the gold standard for intricate plots, reader engagement, story pacing, and character development.34
After graduating third in his class at West Point, astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin joined the United States Air Force to fly fighter jets. Following a tour in Korea, Buzz earned a doctoral degree in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. NASA denied his initial application to its astronaut corps on the grounds he didn’t meet the test pilot requirements. Eventually, in 1963, he was admitted into Astronaut Group 3 under a new alternative requirement of 1,000 hours flying jet aircraft. Buzz became part of the Gemini 12 program, giving him experience in space, including extravehicular activity (EVA), also known as a space walk.
But Aldrin’s most famous moments were still ahead. On July 16, 1969, Aldrin launched into space with fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins as part of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Millions of people listened and watched on radio and television as the astronauts left the physical gravity of Earth behind, en route to another world.
On July 20, while Collins manned Columbia, the command module, Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the Moon in the lunar module, Eagle. Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, but Aldrin followed nineteen minutes later. The pair worked together to place the American flag, take pictures, and perform locomotion experiments. Once back on Earth, the Apollo 11 crew faced a staggering reception filled with honors and parades.
But Aldrin had no idea how he would ever top his Moon Shot experience, and by the end of the year, he had begun to feel like little more than NASA’s publicity puppet. His sense of calling was gone. There was no project he felt like pouring himself into. Alcohol became a friend, and he sought solace with women outside his marriage. For a time, Aldrin hoped for a fresh start with a new job as commandant of the test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base. But he soon checked into Brooks Medical Center, where he began to open up about the depression he was in.
Aldrin publicly revealed his turmoil after he stepped aside and started service with the National Association of Mental Health, started rehab, and got involved with Alcoholics Anonymous. Aldrin’s acknowledgement of his pain and addiction put him on the longer path to recovery. In 1998, he founded the ShareSpace Foundation to promote the expansion of crewed space exploration. Publishing multiple books about space and his personal struggles over the years since, he advocates for both sobriety and mental health. Aldrin has been named a member of the Space Advisory Council, served as a Global Statesman for Space, and supported the think-tank Human SpaceFlight Institute.35,36,37,38
Each of the champions in the stories above reveal the frailties of the human condition. This is even more precarious in our technologically-advanced culture where both physiology and psychology have not yet caught up to the power of the human mind and spirit. These names will live on in human history forever, but it’s not because they had easy lives. It’s because they persevered through their struggles and transformed fear and pain into fuel to energize their actions and change the world.
If they teach you anything, it should be that the struggle ahead is the source of your metamorphosis — your apotheosis — into the person you were always meant to become. Imagine what your future holds and the stories they might tell about your transformation!
If the Johnson Brothers were writing your story, like we did with the champions here, how would you want it to sound? Effortless and without challenge? Or, would you want the world to know you overcame, endured, and finished your race redeemed?
Which mindset is strongest in you?
“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” — Seneca
Call to mind the definition of a stakeholder one last time: A stakeholder is anyone who stands to win or lose as a result of the actions taken based on your findings and your analysis of their reaction to your plans.
This is different from our definition of a teammate because a stakeholder can be — and usually is — a passive participant in the execution of your strategy. Teammates work in collaboration to produce the results you're pursuing. Are teammates all stakeholders? Certainly! Are all stakeholders teammates? Definitely not. In fact, some stakeholders are actively fighting against you.
When your Mercenary looks at different stakeholders a little more closely, you can place them into one of four categories that will prescribe how you interact with them:
stakeholders that matter to your future success, control your ability to operate, and therefore, must co-own your endeavor;
stakeholders you care about and wish to serve, but who can’t serve you;
stakeholders whose opinion you can safely ignore; and,
hostile stakeholders who will be disappointed to see you win and, if they understood the full impact of your plans on them, would actively try to stop you.
Each of these types of stakeholders must be considered for any choice to be controllably actionable, but you needn’t worry too much about delighting them all with the surprises your actions might bring them. To understand this idea, consider the role of any leader in an organization.
Sometimes a person with an axe to grind will push back on some narrow aspect of your organization’s agenda. It would be negligent to your Missionary cause to permit that one person to hold leadership back from directing whatever the vast majority of the team have come together so eagerly to pursue. In any enterprise, we have limited time and resources. As much as we might want to champion everyone’s cause and leave no one behind, we must prioritize which stakeholders we are serving so that we don't lose sight of the winning aspiration.
If your Missionary doesn't prioritize, it's all too easy to burn out as we fight against forces we can’t control.
We might also be rendered ineffective by spending too much time recruiting new teammates to our just cause. Often, when the Missionary gets distracted seeking out consensus among all stakeholders, the Mercenary must intervene to maintain forward progress by acquiring consent from only those who control our ability to operate.
Your Mercenary has no regrets ignoring any stakeholders who don’t matter to your future success.
Stakeholder profile categories can shift over time as your mission changes and stakeholders change with it. As you learned in Section 1: Discovery, every landscape has differing issues, and those issues can have different stakeholders. When your mission changes, your landscape, issues, stakeholders, and trends (the LIST) must change with it.
The people you see as the most important stakeholders in your life today might not be the most important 10 years from now. A champion reevaluates where the people around them sit so they can position themselves in a way that's optimal to win. If you work diligently to regulate the friction between the different stakeholders you serve, you can build trust that helps all stakeholders. Even the hostiles will be able to understand why they fall into one or another of the four stakeholder categories at different times.
Although simulation using guile, empathy, and actionable techniques can give you clues early on about how stakeholders might react, it can take weeks, months, or sometimes even years before some stakeholders realize which side you’re on. As awareness of their situation becomes clearer, you'll see indicators and warnings that reveal their growing understanding. When you see those indicators and warnings begin to emerge, it's time to start accelerating your plans or risk interruption.
Your rationale might need to be ambiguous at times, which is why taking the time to build trust with friendly stakeholders so they’ll know your actions are still serving your plans is important. But your implementation should incorporate the champion’s self-discipline. All of your actions should be grounded in a deliberate strategy to keep hostiles as puzzled as possible about what you’re up to and why.
As you’re on the verge of finishing this book, would you still consider yourself the natural Mercenary who will fight and kill to achieve your winning aspiration? Or are you the Missionary who will sacrifice yourself for your just cause?
Whichever way you describe yourself, you have an opportunity to work on the other mindset to become the champion your stakeholders and teammates can count on to always be preparing the team to win.
In the 1960 film Spartacus, the eponymous Thracian slave is forced to fight as a gladiator in Rome. When Spartacus kills his trainer, Marcellus, to avenge the death of the Ethiopian opponent who’d spared his life — Draba — the fight escalates into a riot. In the chaos that follows, Spartacus and his fellow gladiators escape.
Spartacus leads them across the country, and slaves keep joining the community until his group is as big as an army. The ability of Spartacus’ men to defeat every force sent against them alarms the Roman Senate. Finally, having been betrayed by the Cilician pirates who were supposed to help them escape by sea, Spartacus and his forces are surrounded, and most of them massacred.
Roman Senator Marcus Crassus offers Spartacus and his captured men a pardon, but instead of death, they’ll have to return to slavery. All they have to do is call out which of them is Spartacus. Knowing they’ll be executed by crucifixion in return, all of his men shout “I am Spartacus!” in a final gesture of solidarity.39,40
Like Spartacus and his rebellious slave army, your Missionary + Mercenary must champion each other. Each must be willing to sacrifice to preserve the other.
To keep his fellow slaves free, Spartacus’ Mercenary was willing to fight, kill, die, or do whatever was necessary. Likewise, his Missionary modeled sacrifice for those he loved by putting his own interests after theirs. His just cause was to bring an end to slavery across the Roman Empire — once and for all. But his winning aspiration was to use their rebellion to show how those in bondage were just as human as free citizens. Their authentic selflessness led them to prefer death — together — rather than lose their newfound freedom.
“When a free man dies, he loses the pleasure of his life. A slave loses his pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That’s why he’s not afraid of it. That’s why we’ll win.” — Spartacus41
Memoirs
In Chapter 3: Control, we took a quick look at Derek’s experience with Bill Walsh at the 2003 SCIP conference in Anaheim. As the keynote speaker, Walsh was pivotal in growing Derek’s understanding of how to apply dominion and contingency control factors, even without calling them that at the time. It inspired Derek how to move more deliberately into the field of competitive intelligence, which was new to him back then.
But Walsh was also a fantastic example of a champion, creating a dynastic coaching tree that went far beyond his own time as a coach.42 Much like a family tree shows how children inherit characteristics from their parents, a coaching tree shows how one coach passes on methods and techniques to the next.
Part of what set Walsh apart was his determination to bring players into the game who had the best ability to succeed among near-equals. His primary objective was not necessarily to improve the diversity of football, but he understood that championing the most talented players and qualified coaches was necessary to elevate the sport. He confronted racial tensions present in the National Football League with the intention of bringing those who truly had the highest merit to the game.
Edward DeBartolo Jr., who hired Walsh to his first NFL coaching job in 1979, summed up Walsh’s attitude: “Bill Walsh just wanted the best people. It didn’t matter if they were polka dot or purple.”43 Because of his efforts, minorities such as Dennis Green and Billie Matthews had the opportunity to be put to the test to prove their exceptional level of skill. Coaches were also able to integrate new strategic ideas, including the broadly popular West Coast Offense.44
Like Walsh, we take enormous pride in introducing the best people to our field. We know that our work and results can improve by helping newcomers succeed. But to create a coaching tree of our own, we’re increasingly intentional about sharing what we’ve learned. Some of this sharing happens through company support for Aurora WDC employees or by mentoring high-potential talent in our client organizations. But if that’s all we did, it couldn’t be called authentic selflessness.
Above and beyond work that would only support our own self interests, we actively seek opportunities to coach people new to the field through college partnerships and learning collaborations at conferences. We do this with an aim toward helping people balance the blend of Missionary + Mercenary they bring to their work. Although we’re never sure what impact our coaching will have, we’re excited to help the next generation of practitioners master the principles outlined in this book.
None of this coaching work would be possible if we had not grown up with parents who were champions for each other and their family. Whether it was our mom getting Derek lawn-mowing jobs or our dad carting us to Madison on the Greyhound bus, they modeled their search for clarity and a solid entrepreneurial foundation for us at every turn. Although they’re no longer with us, we think they’d be proud of the men we’ve become, the families we’re raising, and the business we’ve built together. It’s taught us how precious time is and how swiftly life passes us by, which is a prime driver behind why this book comes now — we might not get the chance later, should we wait.
As Vince Lombardi remarked: “Second place is meaningless. You can’t always be first, but you have to believe that you should have been — that you were never beaten — that time just ran out on you.”45 Our parents might have run out of time on this Earth, but they were never beaten, as is evident in the success and attitudes we hold because of what they taught us.
Our parents never used a word like “champion” to describe the fundamentals they were coaching us with. But looking back, we can see how the early principles our parents tried to instill in us came out in the way we interacted with each other.
Months before Arik left for college, during the summer of 1988, we thought it’d be fun to turn a single game of Rummy 500, which could be completed in under an hour in most circumstances, into a summer-long series called Rummy 50,000. By connecting every day to the next, we entertained the idea of what it might be like to switch the time scale of the game from a Mercenary’s winning sprint to the Missionary’s just marathon. This shift dramatically elevated the level of consistent performance necessary to win.
Unintentionally, we discovered the three key champion values of authentic selflessness, insatiable curiosity, and worthy challenge that summer playing cards together.
How can brothers champion each other through adversity?
An account of how the Johnson Brothers didn’t seek each other out as kids — even well into our early 20s — has already been detailed in this book. Our dad’s death on February 1, 1999 changed all that. That shift was taken to the next level on September 6, 2001 when our mom died, too.
When we were in the center of those storms, it was difficult to see the gift of perspective that we were being given. Any benefits were clouded by the sad reality that we’d never see our dear Mom and Dad again — at least not in this physical world.
But I’ve said it a dozen times now, and I’ll probably say it hundreds more before my time ends: Had Mom and Dad not passed away when they did, one or both of them would have attempted to talk me out of joining my older brother Arik in this business. They saw, when they were still here, how much I loved the path I was pursuing, which was to become a portfolio manager to help others develop their own version of financial freedom.
Looking back, that was a path I’d been carving out that was my own blend of Missionary + Mercenary. It might have created, even to this day, an incredibly rewarding and fulfilling career. I guess I’ll never know that for sure.
What I do know is this: Mom and Dad passing away when they did forced Arik and I to champion the cause of each other in the most loving way imaginable. It’s not lost on me, either, that some siblings — whether fighting over assets or the way healthcare directives were carried out with the parents — experience just the opposite. The death of parents occasionally drives a wedge that’s difficult to ever get past. I sure hope that’s not your experience. If it is, I’m sorry.
Arik and I occasionally call the loss of Bob and Honey Johnson, at the specific time it happened, one of the Johnson Brothers’ competitive advantages. That’s not to say we don’t miss them like crazy. We do. But having a champion’s mindset means you seek the ways you can discover, optimize, and simulate growth in your own capabilities every day — but especially in the face of tremendous adversity.
Human life has always been a constant series of trials and tribulations. Some of them will be sad, tragic ones. Take the proper time to mourn and grieve those circumstances. But also look actively for the inherent opportunities that accompany them. Maybe it’s simply a stronger relationship with a sibling, friend, or spouse. Or, it might open the door to something much, much bigger, as was the case with us.
— Derek
Now older and wiser, we connect those values to balance the Missionary + Mercenary. Insatiable curiosity is a squarely Missionary value, as much as worthy challenge is a Mercenary one. Authentic selflessness is a shared sense of purpose that something bigger than we are matters more than we do. This is the common ground that equips Missionary + Mercenary to both work seamlessly together while still individually pursuing their great and highest callings.
But why do we continue to hold on to these values? Why is it important for us, right now, today, to champion the cause of others and outfit them for the path ahead?
Two counterintuitive perspectives on performance might be helpful for you to ask yourself: How does your impression of your own performance affect the options you consider; and, how do others’ opinions of your performance affect the choices you decide upon?
Here’s a simpler way of asking these two critical questions: Who are you trying to impress; and, who are you trying to please?
As his Mercenary tends to be more interested in taking new territory as opposed to defending existing territory, Arik has noticed that most people accept the limits that others place on them. This is often done by simply agreeing to lowered expectations. People seldom challenge themselves to break free of the chains binding them to any other opinion than their own.
It’s foolish to accept another’s definition of performance when the task at hand might never have been done before. Even if those expectations are important, Arik also knows those limits aren’t set in stone. One example is when a client or boss expects a job to be delivered to a certain standard. The expectations of performance when a task has never been done before is purely a shot in the dark. Who says we can’t establish those expectations ourselves the first time?
People should seek first to control themselves rather than having someone else dictate what to do or where their boundaries lie. It’s much more intimidating to pursue this Stoic sense of self-control because it means that, when you miss the mark or fall short of a goal, you’re the only one accountable for your failure. There’ll be nobody else to blame but yourself.
How can an egg delivery man climbing the most sacred peak in China inspire us to prepare to win?
Back in 2002, I had the opportunity to deliver the keynote address for the fifth annual meeting of the Society for Competitive Intelligence in China (SCIC). As the meeting was happening during a holiday, the SCIC coordinators arranged activities for Tina and me, one of which included a climb up Mount Tai (泰山, pronounced in pinyin Tài Shān), the highest point in Shandong province and foremost of the five Sacred Mountains of China.
Tina and I were willing to give the challenge a try. But Mount Tai and Tina’s asthma didn’t particularly get along. From time to time, she had to stop and rest.
As Tina and I caught our breath, we noticed an older guy of about 60 plodding up the mountain. He carried a yoke across his shoulders that balanced two cage-like boxes filled with chicken eggs, which he intended to deliver to the hotel at the top of the mountain. As he closed in on us, I could see he was smoking a filterless cigarette he’d somehow rolled on his own. We’d make a little headway and stop to rest, the guy with the eggs would catch up to us, inspiring us to start again, and the pattern would repeat.
After hours of climbing, Tina was more and more determined not to let the old, smoking man with the eggs beat her to the top of the mountain. But it didn’t help when he somehow managed to roll and light another cigarette and keep going like he made the climb every day.
Except, that’s exactly what he did. His job was to conquer Tài Shān so the hotel guests could have fresh eggs. Did I mention he was barefoot and clothed only in what appeared to be a rudimentary loincloth? He left behind anything unnecessary to conquer the task at hand.
Day after day, he put up with the wear and tear on his body. Day after day, he yoked up his load, knowing that there wasn’t much protection and that a single misstep could cost him everything he had worked so hard to achieve. The old, smoking guy in the loincloth with the yoke of chicken eggs made it look easy to climb Tài Shān. And there was no way Tina was going to let him beat her to the top!
As we neared a split known as the South Gate to Heaven — where the stairs seemed to cut into the face of the mountain — Tina and I assumed we’d reached the summit and the ordeal was nearing its end. When we asked a pair of athletic, young, Australian hikers if we were almost there, they pointed to another peak in the distance and replied that we were getting closer. And the guy with the eggs kept coming.
Really humbling.
Remember times in your life when you’ve spent hours climbing your own Tài Shān. You catch a glimpse of the end in sight, but the challenge carries on, seemingly without end. Wanting to quit when disappointments or setbacks strike is natural. In reality, trials like these are the greatest blessings a champion can be offered.
When you notice a champion working day after day for others, let them inspire you like the Chinese guy with the eggs did for Tina and me. Leave behind whatever you don’t need and continue on with only what matters so that you have the strength to reach your summit — not once, not twice, but over and over again. Once you have enough experience and the climb feels like second nature, you might just look back and find you’re the one pushing others to the top.
— Arik
Accepting accountability can be lonely sometimes. But the liberty that comes from impressing yourself alone is the fundamental champion’s heuristic outlined in this chapter. This is the first and foremost trait a champion looks for in collaboration partners when they are designing a new project. It means they’ll never have to worry about somebody sandbagging or dragging their feet. Arik’s advice is to try and make that same limit-testing your favorite form of recreation so it’ll never feel like work.
For Derek, the champion’s Mercenary is repelled by second-guessing decisions, especially when that decision is unpopular. Stakeholders fall into different levels of influence or importance. But at the end of the day, you have to be at peace with the fact that your original choice was the correct one, even if that choice isn’t the one everyone else agrees with.
Authentic selflessness means you don’t allow your decisions to be driven by your desires, even the desire for consensus with others. Insatiable curiosity means that your choices should always position you and others to learn and improve, especially when short-term pain or discomfort is necessary. Worthy challenge requires tremendous trust in your direction from the stakeholders asking you to guide them, particularly when the benefits of defeating the challenge are ambiguous or far in the future.
In the early days of Aurora WDC, we started with our consulting and research services business, Aurora GPS (Global Professional Services), which has the tagline “Achieve Alpha” and aligns most directly with Optimality. Alpha, as you’ll recall from earlier chapters, is a judgment of superiority that the market gives you. This was the business Arik brought Derek on board to scale. For about the first decade of the business, Arik assumed that this was all there was — a human elicitation, primary-research-based consulting practice that helps client stakeholders take their business to the top project-by-project.
In 2005, we realized there was a Discovery aspect to our company that could even out the rather choppy, project-by-project income stream. Because the GPS model that required us to continuously get new deals was always a kill-to-eat matter of staying on the hunt for the next client engagement, our goal was to build a business with an annuity cash flow cycle.
We started exploring the CI software business, which eventually led to the launch of FirstLight. We gave it the tagline “Magnify Truth” because it helps stakeholders understand, articulate, and rigorously monitor issues, stakeholders, and trends in the landscapes they’re playing in. Even though FirstLight was the second arm of the company to be developed, it provides the foundation that ensures stakeholders can align superiority criteria optimal to their offer — to Achieve Alpha, you must first Magnify Truth. Aurora GPS and FirstLight work in harmony so most of our clients can enjoy the benefits of having both missions fulfilled in an integrated way.
A few years later, after Arik had passed the CEO reins to Derek and started work on the next set of opportunities, we noticed a missing piece of the CI world. There was no safe place to share and transfer knowledge between practitioners where competitive pressures could be carefully handled.
We decided to launch a complimentary learning business, which we named RECONVERGE. This brand is meant to connect intelligence and insights professionals to keep them learning from one another and sharing their knowledge and expertise. Since kicking off in 2013 with a series of symposia, RECONVERGE has helped thousands of people participate in webinars, insight circles, and meetings with a tribe of like-minded professionals.
Due to the strong focus on knowledge sharing and experiential learning, we codified Simulation directly into the flagship conference when we held it the last two times in 2018 and 2019. We designed multi-landscape wargame simulations that deepened the sense of team collegiality and shared interest that only experiences like these can produce.
Starting in 2020, however, COVID-19 forced us to rethink the value proposition and cancel the annual meeting. These engagement pathways help new and experienced analysts alike to understand not only where they fit, but also how to use the skills and tactics necessary to get results in the field by putting strategies to the test. The RECONVERGE tagline “Forge Belonging” reflects this perennial need for knowledge and expertise to transcend generations. As we resurrect the RECONVERGE business, we’re seeing opportunities for the same format we did in public to be applied privately inside a client organization.
Now, with all three brands effectively supporting the three phases of the Discovery-Optimality-Simulation Supercycle, we’re more deliberate about the strategic logic of the corporation behind our businesses. We’re modeling the attitude of a champion by continuously striving to increase the value clients take away. As we finish up our third decade since Aurora’s story started in 1995, one might assume our work is nearing completion. On the contrary, we see that we’ve only just begun.
If the label falls off, will they still know it’s us?
A few months after legendary musician Prince Rogers Nelson passed away, his home in Chanhassen, Minnesota was reopened as a museum. We got to be some of the very first people to take a tour, as we had scheduled a rebranding retreat in the Twin Cities. Our CMO, Jason Voiovich, insisted we make Paisley Park one of the key field trip destinations of our senior leadership offsite.
In the past, neither of us had thought too much about Prince — not really our taste in music, honestly. But when we saw for ourselves how he ended his last performance, playing on a loop in the sound stage where Purple Rain had been filmed, we realized exactly what made Prince special.
Prince wanted you to feel a little bit of what he felt when he performed for you. He was the champion his audience needed. He made us feel like the rockstar he actually was, and he wanted us to live his experience vicariously as deeply as possible.
On April 14, 2016, Prince performed at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. As he exited the stage at the end of that performance, he stopped singing so his audience could take over. He directed them with a wave of his hands and kissed them goodbye.
No one dreamed it would be Prince’s final exit from the stage, the last goodbye he would ever give. Everyone was too caught up in the feeling he’d given them to believe there might be an end coming someday. But that same night, on his way home aboard his private jet, he fell ill after taking what he thought was Vicodin. In reality, it was a counterfeit painkiller laced with fentanyl.46 Prince died a few days later, his last performance a poignant testament to his career.
In reflecting on his home (and now, museum), it occurred to us that Prince’s definition of champion was one reason he protected his music so fiercely. Prince was notorious for having his attorneys mercilessly threaten to sue anyone who tried to cover his songs. He knew that if he didn’t govern the performance of his creations and someone else used his melodies, riffs, lyrical ideas, and storytelling, he would lose control over how he wanted listeners to feel. Was it a hassle for Prince to protect his fans from imposters while they were empathizing with him through his music? For sure. But for Prince, it meant everything.
Because Prince was willing to make those sacrifices over and over again, his sound remains unmistakable. Even when the performance includes other artists or you don’t have the album liner notes to tell you a track is his, you can tell he was behind it by how it makes you feel. His influence on protégés like Sheila Escovedo (Sheila E.) is obvious, and you can feel his distinct aesthetic in everything he produced, especially his most famous film, Purple Rain.
Like Prince, our definition of champion leaves no doubt about who we are. Yes, we are professionals with decades of experience in our field. But we are not just the leaders behind the company, Aurora WDC. We are committed husbands and fathers, unafraid to provide the right balance of love and discipline, just as Jesus taught us.
As it was for Prince, it’s of paramount importance to us that, when our labels fall away, you still sense who’s behind the ideas we’ve shared with you in this book. When you put these ideas to work in your business, family, church, classroom, sports team, or wherever you think they apply, we hope you’ll remember that’s why we wrote it — for you!
— Arik and Derek
Questions to Activate Champion
Our primary purpose in writing this book is to help you master the balancing act of your Missionary + Mercenary mindsets. How does doing so enhance control of the factors governing your future, equip you to redefine superiority for stakeholders, and drive actionability in whichever macro-environments you and your teammates select?
It’s our experience that this balance provides a significant competitive advantage, removes the needless stress of overthinking uncontrollables, and encourages greater mindfulness about how to deal with others. This includes competitors, the blessings-in-disguise who inevitably cause you to elevate how you operate.
Champions are only human. You might need a champion of your own who can complement and support you as you work on behalf of your stakeholders. As both Aurora’s leaders and as brothers, we are champions for each other. We know one another’s strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies. We intentionally lean on each other, especially knowing how much more fun it is to win together, and how much you need a friend when you don’t.
Whether it’s by navigating the collective loss of our parents, trusting each other to take the helm or explore a new path for Aurora, or guiding each other to deeper faith, we serve one another so neither falters. Ask yourself: Who in your life can guide you and help you learn? If the name escapes you at the moment, how might you forge a new relationship that allows you to champion someone else or be championed by them?
This concept — that we aren’t meant to do it all alone — is why you hold this book in your hands. Our invitation to you — our challenge really — isn’t merely to return equipped with these ideas to your community or industry by yourself. Rather, it’s to come along with us on the Missionary + Mercenary journey to see where it leads you.
Like you, we will learn and figure things out together. We’ll look back someday —whether that’s one, 10, or 30 years from now — and recognize that, despite our accomplishments, we’re only just getting started. We look back now at the often painful experiences we’ve had and feel confident they were gifts that now allow us to champion you and your cause.
As we’ve been writing, we’ve been imagining ahead to the future where the book already exists, has thousands of readers, and influences you and those around you for the better.
We hope these ideas tear through the veil of time to bring that future into your present.
We do not know what circumstances you are traveling through or which of the lessons you’ve received are the most important. But the job of a champion is to shine a light on the chisel tip to reveal all aspects of the truth for what it is. This sometimes appears like a passenger at sea intentionally trying to rock the boat.
But how will you know if you’re seaworthy if nobody ever rocks the boat? Without rocking the boat, you — and those who count on you — will never know if you could sink when the storm comes. We all need someone who can be comfortable with friction and test whether or not we’re resilient enough to survive the circumstances we might encounter. It should never trouble a champion if someone comes in need of testing like this.
Being put to the test is what every champion is seeking for themselves in the first place!
We want to ensure you see your challenges — even when they threaten to overwhelm you with a perfect storm — as the gifts they are. We know it can be hard to see trials that way when you’re still in moments of crisis. But we want you to live a life where any opportunity to flex your newfound Missionary + Mercenary leaves you hopeful rather than fearful.
How does surviving the tests of life develop the endurance that produces character?
Perhaps nothing demonstrates this biological nature better than watching a chick hatch from its shell. Our instinct, watching the baby bird struggle, is to pull the pieces of the shell away and help break it free. But it is the struggle against the shell that the chick needs to build bones, muscles, and circulation strong enough to survive the world it’s being born into. If you try to “help” by pulling the pieces of the shell away, the chick isn’t going to thrive; it’ll likely die an early death.
This phenomenon presents another truth about the champion: Good champions can distinguish between what they prejudicially think might help and what actually will. They can stop themselves from acting on their first impulse and know that championing in the right way means letting those we love struggle sometimes.
As we offer this observation from the natural world, we want to point out that most of the recommendations in this book are based on observations we’ve made in hundreds of diverse engagements with clients in nearly every business imaginable. This range of experience has provided us with very nuanced and counterintuitive findings about human behavior and human intelligence. It doesn’t always work like you expect it to; the only universal solution is to always expect the unexpected.
We haven’t really invented anything all that new in this book. We’re mostly inventorying, cataloging, and describing the way we’ve seen all kinds of people turn insights into action. Then, we connect it to our own lives where we’re able to present a more perfect artifact that future generations can use and adapt to their circumstances. Our goal is to turn the intuitive into the intentional so that it can be lived out over and over again by others after we’re long gone.
Whatever tests you might encounter, a crucial point to understand is that a champion is not a champion unless they are acting faithfully in the midst of trouble or obstacles. As our friend, Pastor Jeff Meyer, likes to remind us: “It’s easy to act when things are going well, but a champion acts consistently even when things are going badly.”
Are champions ever afraid? Absolutely! It’s human nature to get scared when we don’t know what to do. Fear is how your ancestors survived long enough to procreate and pass that useful human trait down to you.
But champions understand that stress becomes distress and friction creates drag when they’re paralyzed by inaction. Healthy friction includes a humble teachability, also known as the willingness to be proven wrong. True champions of another’s cause won’t let others be the source of distress by dragging their feet or pulling in the wrong direction.
Champions teach foot-draggers to pick up the pace or be left behind.
We’ve seen that the three-phase Supercycle of actionable insights detailed in this book is a valid and reliable alternative to previous models that were less complete in considering the human factors hindering real success. Going forward, we might slow down or even pause to rest and reorient if we lose our way. We might even pursue a side-quest on this journey from time to time, which can also let others catch up when they fall behind.
But we cannot stand still. One way or another, we move forward. And we want you moving forward with us. If our path sounds like one we can walk together, then here and now — at the very end — is the place we get started.
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