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Being competitive means having a strong desire to win. However, the drive and passion for winning must be channeled into two areas: being self‐competitive and being externally competitive. When you are self‐competitive, you compete with yourself, pushing yourself to improve. In Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Louis Gerstner refers to this self‐competitiveness as “restless self‐renewal,” or the motivation to constantly improve.¹⁶ Self‐competition is a prerequisite for improvement, which the Japanese call kaizen, meaning constant improvement in small increments, leading to huge improvements in the long run, as Toyota practiced religiously on the way to becoming the world’s largest car maker.

Being externally competitive means having a strong desire to beat the competition, those direct competitors in your medium and competitive media. If you are a television station salesperson, you want to beat the salespeople from other television stations to get higher shares of business and get higher rates, while pulling advertising dollars away from websites and Internet platforms, newspapers, radio, and outdoor. Being externally competitive means winning by playing the game fairly and by the rules and not becoming overly competitive either within or out of your own company, which can lead to dishonest and unethical behavior, as described in Chapter 3. This attitude is probably better described as being ethically competitive, externally competitive, and self‐competitive, and is exemplified by being a member of a 400‐meter relay race in the Olympic Games. You cooperate with other team members on passing the baton, as you perfect your own running technique and set increasingly lower lap‐time goals, while your overall goal is for the team to win the race.