How Ambition Fueled the 2024 Super Bowl

There is something extraordinary about a team that maneuvers itself onto one of the top performance platforms in the world.

Take teams in business first. We revere companies that deliver exceptional results. We are struck by the numbers the International Division posts, or by what "the other sales team" achieved. We study their management teams in an attempt to discover their elixir. What is their secret weapon? Their silver bullet? (And what is it with these violence-laden idioms?)

As is always the case, it is rarely just one thing. It is a combination of factors. And where all else is equal - the same product, the same terms, the same market conditions - when one team or one person outperforms another, something more intrinsic is at work. It is their drive, their determination, their chutzpah. It is their ambition.

Ambition is hard to measure. (Cup of ambition, anyone?) But surround yourself with someone who is winning, or join a winning team, and it is easy to feel. The energy is different. The drive is different. The excuses are not as plentiful. The will to win is contagious.

Want proof?

Take the story of Stripe. I love writing about this company. Stripe rose from a small fintech startup in 2010 to a valuation of around $53 billion today.

How did they do it? What can we learn?

For one thing, they are in a business that has never lacked for innovation, disruption, or disrupters. The competition, and the need to be better than good, probably helped. But dive into what makes Stripe great and you find their overwhelming and all-consuming ambition. This is what their own website says:

Stripe builds financial infrastructure that ambitious companies use to launch their boldest products. Our customers range from hours-old startups to complex global businesses. Collectively, they are growing the GDP of the internet.

Stripe processes millions upon millions of transactions, and yet the transactions are not what they lead with. They want to help ambitious companies, and they want to grow the GDP of the internet. Just reading it makes me want to work with them.

The power of ambition

When you are genuinely committed to something great, to doing something epic (like growing the GDP of the internet), a few funny things happen.

The first is that you realize you will not get there by working the way you have always worked, so by pure logic and reason you need to do new and different things, and you need to do them in new and different ways. You might challenge the feckless bureaucracy and the oh-so-many meetings on everyone's calendars. You might start making decisions with fewer people, not because you no longer care for all the input you used to gather, but because it is easier and faster, and on balance a decision made by fewer people is not orders of magnitude worse than a decision made by many more.

The second is that as you aspire to do bigger, greater, more ambitious things, you attract people who want to do bigger, greater, more ambitious things. This is the terrifically exciting Cycle of Ambition.

The third is that you create, and believe, your own reality distortion field. Where previously you might have called a $10 million or $100 million or $1 billion goal bold, you now start believing, because there is evidence of success, that it should be $20 million, or $200 million, or $2 billion.

Which takes us back to the first point. You are not going to hit $2 billion by doing things the way they have always been done.

As a leader, this takes courage and confidence. Set bigger goals. Challenge the conventional ways of working. It also takes an absolute fanaticism (how do you think Sam Walton built Walmart) and the resolve to get up after a setback, because there will be setbacks. It takes a belief.

Super Bowl 2024

All of this brings me to the biggest sporting event in the USA: the Super Bowl. The San Francisco 49ers are facing off against the Kansas City Chiefs.

I do not know much about football. (In truth I know very little; I know rather more about rugby, and even that would fit on the back of a small napkin.) But we do not need to know much about football for this story, because this is the story of how a team maneuvered itself onto one of the top performance platforms in the world.

In 2017, the new General Manager John Lynch huddled with the new coach Kyle Shanahan, the CEO Jed York, and the EVP of Football Operations Paraag Marathe. They were coming together. Forming. And what they were about to do back then in 2017 would set them on the path to the Super Bowl in 2024.

They shared what they believed in, their philosophies on life and leadership and teams. They talked about where the 49ers were, and where they could be. Where they should be. They articulated the vision of a team that would become a championship team.

We firmly believe that players who embody these core values will change the culture and reestablish The 49er Way - a Brotherhood that will lead us back to competing for championships year after year.

And yet they also knew that, like the many companies that run a mission, vision, and values exercise and then still do nothing exceptional, they needed to live it, to believe it, to want it. They needed ambition.

This is what they created:

Look carefully and you will see words chosen with care, a clear statement of what they stood for (and by exclusion, what they did not stand for), and the behavior they wanted to see, along with the inverse behavior they would not tolerate.

And it was never a one-off activity done to make people feel good. They lived it. In the locker room, on the field, and off the field. When the cameras were on, and importantly when the cameras were off.

Ambition is what transforms your vision into results

Their ambition, to lead the organization back to the top of the NFL, was compelling. So compelling that they made it to the Super Bowl this year. When the 49ers got together seven years ago to outline their audacious and ambitious assault on the top of the NFL, they were not charting a perfunctory mission, vision, values exercise. It was believed in. It was embraced. It was lived, all the time.

The hard part

It is easy to see it all laid out. So many companies run through their vision, mission, and values work. That is the easy part. Those same companies then post lackluster results, setting themselves up for cycles of weaker and weaker performance, panic, and crisis management. The ambition is the hard part. It is what Stripe got right, and it is what the 49ers got right.