If you're not playing to win, be prepared to lose

Are you playing to play, or playing to win?

That's the question posed to business leaders by a pair of Boston Consulting Group executives in a provocative Harvard Business Review article this month and a book due to be published next fall.

But it's really more of a challenge than a question. Because the authors, George Stalk Jr. and Rob Lachenauer, clearly believe too much of the American business world has gone soft. In their view, it's easy to spot the winners and to identify their fundamental behavior: The winners play hardball, and they seek to trounce the competition.

"Hardball players pursue with a single-minded focus competitive advantage and the benefits it offers -- leading market share, great [profit] margins, rapid growth, and all the intangibles of being in command," Stalk and Lachenauer wrote in the review. "They pick their shots, seek out competitive encounters, set the pace of innovation, test the edges of the possible. They play to win. And they do."

Who are these hardball players? Stalk and Lachenauer cited several examples: Toyota Motor Corp. has moved up the food chain from compact cars to full-sized vehicles to the last of Detroit's strongholds, light trucks and sport utility vehicles. Dell Inc. has cut costs relentlessly, and distanced itself from rivals through aggressive price competition. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has undercut competitors like Kmart Holding Corp., striking when they are weakest, and squeezed suppliers like Rubbermaid.

"The world's not populated by a large number of these companies," Stalk, a Boston Consulting senior vice president based in Toronto, said in an interview. "But they tend to be the winners."

While hardball players are busy pushing their advantage by devastating their rivals' profit sanctuaries or raising their competitors' costs, softball players often can be found clamoring for trade restrictions or complaining to the courts, the duo suggested.

"They will posture and pout," Stark and Lachenauer observed disdainfully. "Meanwhile, they will let billions of dollars of shareholder wealth drip, drip, drip into oblivion. Hardball players are immune to this sort of thing. In fact, they have a name for it. They call it whining."

While it's easy to dismiss such pronouncements as high-priced consulting machismo, or sentiments inappropriate for the aftermath of the Enron Corp. and Tyco International Ltd. scandals, the authors make clear they are not advising executives to manipulate financial results to make themselves or their companies look better. Such manipulations, they argue, are softball tactics. "Hardball players don't cheat," they wrote.

But there is often a fine line between playing hardball and resorting to unethical behavior, and hardball companies can cross that line, warned Richard A. Spinello, associate research professor at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, who does research in the field of business ethics. As an example, Spinello cited Microsoft Corp.'s bullying of computer makers to install its Internet Explorer browser on Windows-powered personal computers in the 1990s.

"Aggressiveness in business is a good thing, but you have to be very careful when you do that," Spinello said. "You get into this aggressive mindset, and it's sometimes hard to know when to pull back. You have to be conscious of fair competition as an ethical norm."

Stark said the idea for the Harvard Business Review article and book-in-progress stemmed from his quarter-century in consulting, during which he saw over and over again which strategies worked. He also noted that, over that same period, the lion's share of popular business books promoted "squishy" concepts like empowering employees, hugging customers, and nurturing corporate culture.

"The straw that broke my camel's back was 'Who Moved My Cheese?' " Stark said, referring to a 1998 business book about humans and mice living in a maze that is a parable for workplace change.

Successful chief executives shouldn't pander to employees, vendors, or competitors, Stark contended, and they shouldn't be afraid to tell shareholders that their companies are playing to win.

"When the sun rises," he said, "you have to win a customer away from a competitor."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.