The lesson is clear: assessing the current tactical advantages of known competitors will not help you understand the resolution, stamina, and inventiveness of potential competitors. Sun-tzu, a Chinese military strategist, made the point 3,000 years ago: "All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer,” he wrote, “but what none can see is the strategy out of which great victory is evolved.” cornpanies that have risen to global leadership over the past 20 years invariably began with ambitions that were out of all proportion to their resources and capabilities. But they created an obsession with winning at all levels of the organization and then sustained that obsession over the 10- to 20-year quest for global leadership. We term this obsession "strategic intent.” On the one hand, strategic intent envisions a desired leadership position and establishes the crite- rion the organization will use to chart its progress. Komatsu set out to "Encircle Caterpillar." Canon sought to ”Beat Xerox.” Honda strove to become a second Ford—an automotive pioneer. All are expressions of strategic intent. At the same time, strategic intent is more than simply unfettered ambition. (Many companies possess an ambitious strategic intent yet fall short of their goals.) The concept also encompasses an active management process that includes: focusing the organization’s attention on the essence of winning; motivating people by communicating the value of the target; leaving room for individual and team contributions; sustaining enthusiasm by providing new operational definitions as circumstances change ; and using intent consistently to guide resource allocations. Strategic intent captures the essence of winning. The Apollo program—landing a man on the moon ahead of the Soviets—was as competitively focused as Komatsu’s drive against Caterpillar. The space program became the scorecard for America's technology race with the USSR. In the turbulent information technology industry, it was hard to pick a single competitor as a target, so NEC’s strategic intent, set in the early 1970s, was to acquire the technologies that would put it in the best position to exploit the con- vergence of computing and telecommunications. Other industry observers foresaw this convergence, but only NEC made convergence the guiding theme for subsequent strategic decisions by adopting "computing and communications" as its intent. For Coca-"arm's reach” of every consumer in the world. Strategic intent is stable over time.