The Two Fights You’re Actually In
There is a fight going on inside you, and another one going on around you. Most executives only train for the second one.
The inner fight is the one nobody puts on a status report. It’s the fight to make the right decision for the long term when it costs you something now — turning down a referral fee from a vendor whose product isn’t right for the client, quietly, legally, with nobody ever likely to ask. The fee is the short-term pleasure. The sacrifice protects the only thing that makes the advice worth paying for: that it’s yours, not the vendor’s. It’s the fight to keep going when your body, mind, and heart all want to stop — the fourth hard conversation of the week, where it would be so much easier to let the meeting run long on pleasantries and leave the difficult sentence unsaid. And it’s the fight to do the right thing when an easier, compromised version is sitting right there — a Director of Corporate Services who could extend an underperforming vendor’s contract without a re-tender, and nobody would question it, but runs the proper process anyway because that’s what the role exists to protect.
The outer fight is the one everyone can see, and the one organisations are actually built for. It’s the fight to prove yourself and protect your standing — an executive who championed a system selection two years ago, and now defends it in every board meeting instead of naming what isn’t working, because admitting the choice was wrong feels like losing more than the software. It’s the fight to win — a project manager who pushes go-live forward to land inside the quarter, because “delivered on time” reads better on a performance review than “delivered right.” It’s the fight to hold market share — vendors underbidding each other on a tender, competing on price instead of being honest about what the organisation actually needs. And for some of the organisations I work with, it’s a bigger fight still — an Aboriginal corporation insisting its systems are built around its own governance and self-determination, not just whatever a template hands them.
Here is the trap: as we’ve built ourselves into structured workplaces with governance frameworks, RAID logs, and steering committees, we’ve told ourselves the fighting has stopped. That process equals peace. It hasn’t stopped. Both fights are running at all times, in every program, in every meeting. A RAID log with zero open risks after six months isn’t evidence the fighting is over — it’s evidence someone stopped logging the fight. Somewhere, the outer fight won and the inner fight lost. Someone chose to protect the appearance of control instead of fighting for control itself.
You don’t get out of the fight. You only get better at fighting it — and you get better by being specific about three things.
What are you actually fighting for? Not “project success” as a slogan — the actual thing. Original intent. The reason the business case was signed before politics and vendor relationships got involved.
What are you actually protecting? Not your own comfort in the next steering committee, not the vendor relationship, not your own track record. The value the organisation paid for.
What does winning actually mean for you? A clean board pack today, or a system that still does what it was meant to do eighteen months after go-live? Those are not the same win, and the outer fight will always argue for the first one, because it’s faster and it looks better in the minutes.
Values are not preserved through statements. They are preserved through sacrifice — through the version of you that takes the short-term hit so the long-term thing survives. That’s the whole discipline: fight with clarity about what you’re actually defending, disassociate from how it makes you look in the room, think long term, and don’t stop.
