Short YouTube talk (excerpt) in which Kevin Plank argues that businesses should pick a "nemesis" — a focal competitor or challenge — as motivation, but that winning often means creating a new market rather than defeating an incumbent. He uses Under Armour's strategy of "making our own pie" (creating a new category) as the breakthrough that allowed growth without zero-sum competition.
It's good to have a nemesis. Luke Skywalker. Wouldn't be him if he didn't have Darth Vader. And so you need to decide and define who's your Darth Vader. And then you typically put them over the dartboard and you throw darts at them and you think about them, but you understand that in order for you to be successful, it's got nothing to do with anybody else. And frankly, the games that we all are typically playing are not zero sum games either. And so in order for us to win, which is still part of the ethos and philosophy we take at Under Armour today, it's not a matter necessarily of someone else losing. In sporting goods, the pie was about this big and you'd look and people were constantly trying to take share from each other back and forth. And when we got into it and the thing that allowed us for our breakthrough was we effectively went and made our own pie. And with that we created this new category and it gave us the legs to think about not necessarily how we compared to somebody else, but the opportunity that we had. I think when comparing what we were doing versus compared to what we felt the opportunity was.
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