The problem with victory—especially frequent victories—is that it breeds arrogance and complacency. This phenomenon, known as “the disease of victory”, has ensnared countless individuals and groups throughout the ages. Be aware of this tendency and guard yourself against it.
Napoleon’s Victory Disease
When Napoleon was emperor of France, he headed the strongest military of the time. They were indomitable on land, crushing collectives of other countries in the Coalition Wars. Napoleon wanted France to stay the dominant force in Europe, so he imposed the Continental System, a geopolitical and economic construct to restrict trade among other countries. Primarily, Napoleon targeted the British Empire.
Because of France’s military strength, Napoleon enforced the Continental System forcefully. One country he went after for violating the Continental System was Russia.
Napoleon pushed into Russia in October 1812. The Russians, inferior to the French in combat, refused to engage. Instead, they retreated, and the French pursued them, leading to the French supply lines being stretched further and further. Napoleon actually made it to Moscow after months of heavy losses. But the Russian Czar never conceded to Napoleon and after a month, Napoleon was forced to retreat because of the severe cold, starved supply lines, and depleted military morale.
Napoleon made a major miscalculation by invading Russia. Doing so nearly wiped out the French military and ultimately weakened it enough to be defeated by the Sixth Coalition, a group of countries consisting of Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Russia. After that defeat, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and was exiled to a remote island.
Napoleon overestimated the abilities of the French military and underestimated that of the Russian military (and Russian winters).
129 years later, Hitler made the same mistake.
Hitler’s Victory Disease
In early 1941, Hitler was riding high. Almost two years into World War II, the Nazis had successfully invaded Poland, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Confidence was brimming, which influenced Nazi Germany’s decision to invade Russia. Doing so expanded the reach of the war, spreading Germany to fight on two fronts. Despite the failure of this strategy in World War I, Germany tried it again.
At first, it looked like Germany had made the right call. They quickly pushed hundreds of miles into Russian territory and destroyed many Russian assets.
But the sprint turned into a marathon.
Germany confidently expected a quick Russian collapse, but the Russians wore down German forces with attrition warfare, absorbing blow after blow. The German military could not sustain its multi-front warfare for as long as it was lasting. Weakened and dispirited, the German military was forced to retreat from Russia.
Victory Breeds Arrogance and Complacency
Flip through the pages of history and you’ll see the prevalence of the disease of victory. It happens all the time, which indicates that the process in which we incorporate feedback to adjust our expectations is susceptible to flaws.
Both success and failure supply feedback, but failure usually provides the best kind of feedback. Success makes us think that what we did works and we should repeat it. It doesn’t factor in the degree to which luck played in the outcome. It also blinds us to the nuances of our victory, which may hold the keys to understanding why what happened actually worked out.
Nuance often resides within the decisions we make and the actions we take, not the outcomes themselves. But we tend to only look at the outcome as a proxy to judge the quality of our decisions or performance, which can yield wildly inaccurate comprehension of what actually happened. Success encourages us to overemphasize outcomes and underemphasize processes.
Moreover, continued success often makes us feel entitled to future success, regardless of our preparation. This is reckless thinking, the type that almost ensures our downfall. On a team, it’s everyone’s responsibility to guard against this recklessness, but especially the leader. Jocko Willink talks about the dangers of the disease of victory and the leader’s role in guarding against it in the book The Dichotomy of Leadership.
A chief contributing factor to recklessness comes from what military historians have long referred to as ‘the disease of victory.’ This disease takes place when a few battlefield successes produce an overconfidence in a team’s own tactical prowess while underestimating the capabilities of its enemy or competitor. This is a problem not just for combat leaders but for leaders and teams anywhere, in any arena, throughout the business world and the civilian sector. It is the leader’s duty to fight against this disease of victory so that the team, despite its success, never gets complacent. The risk in any action must be carefully weighed against the potential rewards of mission success. And of course, to counter that thought, the cost of inaction must be weighed as well.
In war, the complacency that the disease of victory breeds is a matter of life and death. There is no room for error in combat. Everyone must exercise caution to avoid any complacency seeping in. But as Jocko mentioned in the quote above, the disease of victory is also prevalent in many other arenas. Let’s explore some of those.
The Disease of Victory in Business
Blockbuster
In 1992 Blockbuster was the undisputed king of video rentals. It grew from its inception in 1985 to over 2,800 stores worldwide. A couple of years later in 1994, Viacom bought Blockbuster for $8.4 billion. Times were good and there were few clouds on the horizon.
But in 1999 Viacom spun off Blockbuster for a little over half of what they bought it for. And in 2010 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.
One major factor in Blockbuster’s decline was the disease of victory. According to Marc Randoff, co-founder of Netflix, the Netflix founders approached Blockbuster to merge their operations. Their vision was to leverage the strengths of Netflix (online) with Blockbuster (in-store).
But during the meeting with Blockbuster, Randoff perceived an air of arrogance from the Blockbuster executives. He claims that when Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, made the pitch, the Blockbuster executives were trying not to laugh.
Through Reed’s pitch and Barry’s windup, I had been watching Antioco (CEO of Blockbuster). I had seen him use all the tricks that I’d also learned over the years: lean in, make eye contact, nod slowly when the speaker turns in your direction. Frame questions in a way that makes it clear you’re listening. But now that Reed had named a number, I saw something new, something I didn’t recognize, his earnest expression slightly unbalanced by a turning up at the corner of his mouth. It was tiny, involuntary, and vanished almost immediately. But as soon as I saw it, I knew what was happening: John Antioco was struggling not to laugh.
Marc Randoff in That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
Because Blockbuster was at the top of its game in the early to mid 90’s, they kept doing what was working in the present and, as a result, underinvested for the future. Instead of transitioning to other sales channels like mail-order DVD’s and online streaming (like Netflix was doing), Blockbuster stuck to the in-store strategy. They didn’t think the acquisition of Netflix (at least for the $50 million Netflix was asking) was worth it.
Blockbuster overestimated its abilities going forward and underestimated what competitors and the market would look like in the decades ahead. Eventually, Blockbuster did start to invest in online streaming. But during a change in management, the company reversed course and scrapped the online strategy. At that point, Blockbuster’s fate was sealed. Had arrogance and complacency not taken root from Blockbuster’s early success, they likely would have survived into the current world of streaming platforms.
In business, innovation is key to long-term survival. You have to always be iterating for the future. What works today might not work tomorrow. To hope that it will is naive and not an acceptable strategy. Relying on that hope is being complacent.
Complacency, a byproduct of the disease of victory, kills innovation. There has to be a desire or a need to keep growing. Without this, you start to stagnate. And in a dynamic world constantly in flux, stagnation leaves you behind.
The Disease of Victory in Sports
USA Olympics Basketball
The 1992 Olympics were the first to permit professional basketball players to compete. As a result, the USA had a team stacked with the best players in the world. They dominated every opponent, winning gold that year, the following Olympics in 1996, and again in 2000.
They were invincible. Until they weren’t.
The 2004 Olympics are remembered in infamy for the USA basketball team. The team who only knew victory was humbled in the first game by losing massively to Puerto Rico; 92-73 was the final score. Team USA secured a few shaky wins after that, but lost to Lithuania in the group stage and again to Argentina in the semifinals. The team accustomed to winning gold went home with bronze instead, and they were fortunate to leave with a medal at all.
The successes of previous USA Olympic basketball teams weren’t instructive to future teams. Their previous wins only solidified the belief that they couldn’t lose. Until they did.
The failures of the 2004 USA Olympic basketball team were, in contrast, highly instructive. They served as a real catalyst for improvement. Using the 2004 Olympics as motivation, Team USA dominated the 2008 Olympics, easily winning gold. They also went on to win gold in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympics.
It will be key for USA basketball leadership to maintain a high level of discipline to not become complacent with their string of gold medals. Remembering the painful defeat of 2004 and that it could easily happen again will help stave off the disease of victory.
Conclusion
The disease of victory is a phenomenon bred by success that, ironically, sabotages future successes. It is dangerous because of how easy it is to catch the disease matched by how difficult it is to eradicate it.
One way to avoid the disease of victory is to become more familiar with it. Specifically, what causes the disease? And what are the possible outcomes?
The byproducts of the disease of victory can be categorized into two buckets: errors of omission and errors of commission.
Omission
An omission is not doing something. Something is left out. Omission is Blockbuster not taking Netflix seriously. It’s the USA Olympic Basketball team not properly preparing for the 2004 games. Omission creates an environment where complacency takes root.
In life, innovation is key to long-term survival. You have to be iterating for the future. What works today might not work tomorrow. To hope that it will is naive and does not constitute an acceptable strategy.
Complacency kills innovation. There has to be a desire or a need to keep growing. Without this, you start to stagnate. And in a dynamic world that’s constantly in flux, stagnation leaves you behind.
Complacency is a disease, especially for individuals and organizations that have enjoyed success. . . . It’s like dry rot or woodworm because, once damp gets into the brickwork or insects into the wood, you don’t notice the damage until it’s too late.
Sir Alex Ferguson in Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United
Commission
A commission is committing to something and doing it. This is where arrogance is dangerous.
Arrogance makes us overestimate our abilities and underestimate the abilities of our competitors. It tricks us into doing brash, reckless things because we think we are capable. It also makes us feel entitled to success, blinding us to the realities of preparation and probability.
Overall
Ultimately, the disease of victory is like other diseases: we don’t want to have it. It’s easy to rest on feelings of accomplishment, but we must galvanize those feelings with a heavy dose of reality. This may temper the ecstasy of winning in the short term. But the long-term satisfaction gained by avoiding future failures is incalculable and well worth the wait.
The choice is up to you: either revel in the emotion of your success and be overtaken by the disease of victory, or temper the feedback from success and increase the likelihood of future successes. The choice is simple. The execution is not.
Something about success has a tendency to bring about an end to that very essential process of constant never-ending education—unless the tendency is actively resisted, and then resisted yet again.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, by Maria Konnikova
