There ain't no second prize.

Not sure Jimmy Barnes had this right but I’ll tackle it with experience from my extensive sporting success.

How sweet it is to hit the winning home run in the under 13’s baseball final. How satisfying to score the winning basket in the district school championship game. Okay, enough of my sporting glory, as fleeting as it was. Sporting analogies are often used in the world of business to designate success for companies and individuals. Seems everyone is striving to be number one.

So is second place worthwhile or is that just the loser in a grand final? Maybe it’s next year’s winner, knowing what they have to change to win? From a sporting arena it’s easy to pick winners but in the world of business it’s a much more subjective argument.

With only one so called winner, does that relegate everyone else to second place and beyond? Does it leave a lot of us working on our game (more subtle use of sporting analogy) to find improvements which can equate to future success?

The adage of how you play the game strikes a chord in me and today’s business is as much about the way you conduct yourself and how that defines you in the business community. How do you want to achieve your success? Is it at all costs or can you play the game with integrity and fair play?

The business game today is more concerned about acquisition and consolidation, making it hard to pick the winner. Number ones are often the targets for takeovers. Turnover and gross profits can disappear overnight with bad press and falling share prices, so maybe being number one is not all it’s cracked up to be?

Companies playing in the same field can continue to compete at all costs to attain the top spot along with bruised employees or be creative and find an empty field to play on. The analogies never end. Think about Cirque du Soleil competing with those lions and tigers until they decided to replace the real animals with human animals. With no direct competition on that playing field, success was assured.

Looking for new playing fields is one way to avoid that second place but what about admitting who you are and what you do, are good enough, and that you’ll try harder than the other guys. That would certainly appeal to my sense of fair play and it has worked effectively for Avis on a local and global level without losing their integrity along the way, with a win at all cost thinking. The trick is, they now find themselves in that number one spot in many areas, so they have convince their clients that they are still trying harder than the next guy.

So unless you are always going to be number one, you had better figure out some strategies and work on a game plan (last one I promise) that will bring you success regardless of your position at the end. More and more today, it’s about how you finish and not where you finish to give you that winning feeling..

Thankfully I have the memories of that home run to sustain me into my golden years. I couldn’t imagine what third place must have felt like.