The warfare tactic your team is missing…
How a common enemy sharpens everything.
Matt Hunter • April 7, 2026
Every business benefits from a little healthy competition. A common enemy is a warfare tactic that sharpens priorities and heightens intensity around an important goal. When this approach is in balance, it looks like healthy competition. You’re doing this to channel the team’s competitive spirit because defeating the opponent would materially improve your position. Choose a larger rival to make the chase aspirational. This is not a hardcore obsession. There’s no scorched-earth tactic, no dehumanizing, no “eliminate them” rhetoric. It’s not rooted in personal vendettas. Instead, it offers a temporary, energizing framework that sets a new pace and standard. You keep guardrails in place: prioritize customer value first and avoid public trash talk. When you win (or when the window closes), debrief, celebrate, and retire the mantra. That’s what makes this a tactic of warfare.
The ultra-hardcore version of the common enemy playbook is perhaps best exemplified by early Microsoft. Bill Gates didn’t want peaceful coexistence; he wanted rivals eliminated. His approach was more fixation than strategy and was, frankly, insane for a leader already sitting atop the industry. The podcaster David Senra describes a young Bill Gates as “Genghis Khan dressed as Mr. Rogers.” His math was brutal and clear: Your odds rise as theirs fall, so deals won or lost carry double the stakes. Lose a deal to your enemy, and you also strengthen their war chest.
In the late ’80s, Philippe Kahn, CEO of the much smaller computing technology company Borland, was at the top of that enemy list. Gates was monomaniacally focused on out-learning, out-hiring, and out-shipping Borland, using Microsoft’s size and bundled deals to make it hard for Borland to compete. Microsoft poached at least thirty-four Borland employees using multimillion-dollar bonuses. Gates went so far as to make it personal: According to the former Microsoft software engineer Raymond Bily in the book Hard Drive, “It was very personal to [Bill]. It was Bill versus Philippe rather than Microsoft versus Borland.” Microsoft handed out T-shirts to its staff that read “Delete Philippe.” The executive team held a standing meeting focused on beating Borland called the “Borland War Councils.” Gates reportedly walked into one of those meetings, threw a photo of Kahn on the table, and said, “How can I get rid of this guy?” The obsession was personal and real. Kahn himself spotted Gates at a conference, in the corner by himself, staring at a photo of Kahn. (Keep in mind that at this time, Gates was already a billionaire, and Microsoft was the undisputed leader in its category.) In the end, Microsoft prevailed. Within a decade, Borland sold off its developer tools unit for $23 million and was acquired for $75 million.
During my co-author John’s first coaching practice in the ’90s, he worked with the top forty emerging leaders at Nike, including Mark Parker, whose leadership potential was evident. (He went on to serve as Nike’s CEO and president from 2006 to 2020.) By the time John got to Nike, the common-enemy approach was already deeply integrated into the company culture. The small Portland-area upstart had a hardcore chip on its shoulder. Its main competitor was Adidas, a powerhouse German incumbent with decades of dominance. Framing Adidas’s three stripes as the company’s mountain to climb gave Nike an immediate storyline: It was David versus Goliath. Playing “David” clarified who they were as a company and what they stood for—scrappiness, an “athletes first” ethos, and the ability to move faster than the establishment.
Inside the company, cofounder and CEO Phil Knight nurtured that insurgent identity. He was obsessed with winning the fight and dominating the market. He encouraged a “contempt” for Adidas’s “arrogance of unchallenged dominance” and wanted to “kick the shit out of” the three stripes. This attitude became a North Star that focused priorities. Day to day, it was less “just do it” and more “just out-innovate that German Goliath.” This forged both a powerful internal unity and a crisp external identity.
When it came to athlete partnerships, the rivalry drove Nike to compete harder. The young Michael Jordan was a self-described “Adidas nut” and even told Nike’s Sonny Vaccaro that he’d probably sign with Adidas. When Adidas’s leaders hesitated (they were in flux internally and thought a taller player would better fit their plan), Nike acted quickly. They brought Jordan to campus, made a bold, unprecedented offer, built a signature line around him, and the rest is history. The deal rewrote the script for athlete endorsements. Nike eventually surpassed Adidas and established itself as the leading global athletic brand. By the time Adidas went public in 1995, its valuation was roughly a third of Nike’s.
Japanese company Komatsu is a classic example of leveraging the David-versus-Goliath dynamic. In the 1970s the company was still a scrappy, Asian market–focused player staring up at Caterpillar, the global leader in heavy equipment. Komatsu made the rivalry explicit with a single, memorable charge: “Encircle Caterpillar.” Not destroy Caterpillar, mind you. Not conquer Caterpillar. The plan was to encircle Caterpillar. This strategy borrowed its logic from the board game Go: Don’t run headfirst into your opponent’s strongest stones. Surround them instead. Komatsu established a presence where Caterpillar’s was thin, expanding into underserved geographies and product niches and strengthening distribution and service close to customers.
Meaning layered atop strategy proved to be a powerful equation. Employees weren’t just selling bulldozers; they were part of a courageous global campaign to box in a dominant rival. That story created unity across the team, sharpened priorities, and gave everyday execution a heightened urgency and significance.
The results followed. Komatsu advanced from a regional contender to the world stage, becoming the second-largest construction and mining equipment manufacturer in the world and beating Caterpillar in key Asian markets. The lesson here is clear: The ego loves a fight, and wise leaders give it one that serves the mission.
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PPS. My friends (and mentors) Keith Kurlander and Will Van Derveer just published their amazing book, Psychedelic Therapy: A Revolutionary Approach to Restoring Your Mental Health and Reclaiming Your Life. I'm already 50 pages in and am enjoying it thoroughly, not to mention the forward is written by the legend Gabor Maté. Definitely check this book out!