logo
episode-header-image
May 2019
25m 25s

How Having a Rival Improves Performance

Harvard Business Review
About this episode
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at The Wharton School, argues that individuals and companies alike can benefit from having rivals. He has studied sports and business rivalries and believes they often add up to more than just zero-sum competition. Grant explains how we can perform and even feel better by taking the risk of treating our rivals more lik ... Show More
Up next
Yesterday
The Kinds of Humor That Help Leaders Build Trust
Leading an organization is a serious job, but Adam Christing argues that humor is a shortcut to building trust at an organization - and without it, you might be missing out on an important leadership tool. Christing is a comedian, speaker and author and he walks through five main ... Show More
30m 27s
Aug 19
How to Bring More Rigor to Your Long-Term Thinking
Amid great economic, political, and technological change, it can feel impossible to predict what might happen next. Nick Foster, a futurist and designer who has worked at Google X, Sony, and elsewhere, says that most of us struggle because we tend to fall into one pattern of thin ... Show More
32m 1s
Jul 29
What We Know About Leading with Intuition
It might seem risky to base decisions as a leader on your gut feeling or intuition. But Laura Huang's research has found that intuition isn't just an arbitrary thought or emotion; that it’s the culmination of years of data and observation, and that it is worth listening to. The N ... Show More
34m 33s
Recommended Episodes
Mar 2021
Why Do We Compete?
Have you ever felt competitive with a friend or a sibling? Competition comes up in a lot of different ways in life. Maybe you're running a race with a friend and you want to beat them! Maybe you're trying to play a song without making a mistake and you're competing against yourse ... Show More
22m 57s
Mar 2021
That Rivalries Episode
There are rivalries everywhere in football; local derbies, competition for places and battles between managers all contribute to the game’s biggest rivalries. Crouchy discusses why strikers all legitimately hate each other and what it is like playing in a game where two huge riva ... Show More
51m 56s
Oct 2022
How students' right to earn shook up US sport
University sport in the US has become huge business. For decades, students' share of those earnings only came in the form of scholarships. As television contracts got bigger, so did the calls for change - and last year students were granted the right to earn off their name, image ... Show More
19m 17s
Jul 2022
258: Being competitive the right way (Strategy Skills classics)
For this episode, let's revisit the 42nd podcast on the Corporate Strategy & Transformation study. What I noticed on this, and other studies is that the associates and business analysts are very competitive, in a way that is damaging to clients, to the firm and to their own caree ... Show More
14m 10s
Dec 2023
409: Being competitive the right way (Strategy Skills classics)
For this episode, let's revisit the 42nd podcast on the Corporate Strategy & Transformation study. What I noticed on this, and other studies is that the associates and business analysts are very competitive, in a way that is damaging to clients, to the firm and to their own caree ... Show More
14m 10s
Apr 2023
341: Ex McKinsey expert on war games, John Horn. How to read your competitors
Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 341, an interview with the author of Inside the Competitor's Mindset, John Horn, where he shares proven techniques to help businesses think like the competition and understand why they act the way they do. Inside the Competitor’s Mindset present ... Show More
1 h
Oct 2022
How to outthink your competition -- with a lesson from sports | Rasmus Ankersen
Does success come from luck or skill, and how do you tell the difference? One way to find an answer: think like a pro gambler does, says football executive Rasmus Ankersen. Using sports analytics to emphasize his point, Ankersen digs into the reasons why successful companies ofte ... Show More
16m 16s
Feb 2021
Rapid Response: Why we need to think again, w/Adam Grant
As we grapple with pandemic-charged change in business and as a society, we’ve become more fractured, more divisive, and more vulnerable. Adam Grant, best-selling author and professor at the Wharton School, argues that recognizing what we don't know is the key step on the road to ... Show More
30m 43s