I used to have a charming Swedish client that spoke English much better than I did, albeit with the occasional interesting turn of phrase.  I was banging on at him once about the dangers of a challenger becoming Number One, how it often was accompanied by a mindset change: they stopped behaving in the way that got them to Number One in the first place. Ah yes, he said to me, that is the backside of success. Which is, of course, exactly what it is. I had just never thought of it quite in that way.

Anyway, I was doing some work on the Toyota recall this morning, and I came across this, in a good Reuters article.

‘…Toyota insiders and rivals had also begun to note other signs of distress in an organization that had started the decade with a goal to double its global market to 15 percent. The implicit outcome was understood by everyone in the industry: overtaking GM as No. 1.

On the cusp of hitting that benchmark, some inside Toyota began to worry. To their minds, the goal had always been intended as one of Toyota’s audacious stretch targets, like Watanabe’s vision of a car that would clean the air. Toyota had even dropped it as a target, but now it was happening. “We feel more comfortable being behind someone else and not No. 1,” said Yoshi Inaba, who was summoned out of retirement to set right U.S. operations. ‘

Two things clearly interesting about this. The first is the last quote (true of most challengers, in reality).

The second is the thought that actually the very desire for a challenger to be number one, if allowed to become the dominant ambition of that challenger, can undermine the culture to such an extent that when it finally gets there it is a very different kind of company. And one much less able to cope with the pressures of success that come with that position.

Which presents them with a very different kind of obesity crisis. Success, it seems can have a very big backside.