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One of my younger brothers is in B2B sales. He’s really good at it and is often recruited by Fortune 100 companies that want to throw him ungodly amounts of money. He has a gift for turning relationships into revenue without it being gross. I joke with him that if I had his skills in making money with my knack for saving it, I’d have a chance at being wealthy.

For people in sales like my brother, including for many senior executive roles, it’s typical to incentivize top talent with financial bonuses, revenue share, profit share, and more. Providing financial incentives is a smart way to keep people motivated, contributing to what matters, and increasing the right employee retention. When done well, it also helps organizations navigate labor costs (pay the best, better) and set aligned goals. There is ample research suggesting that financial incentives significantly affect motivation and performance.

But for companies and teams that don’t provide these financial bonus options, and the nonprofits that are reluctant to think this way, the incentives start to look radically different. Even in sales-centric cultures with financial incentive packages, these alone do not ensure meaningful alignment or shared success. While helpful tools like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Management by Objectives (MBOs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), among others, bring clarity and focus, they do not solve for incentives.

Like you and me, the Antagonist likes incentives. When behavior is rewarded, more of that behavior will continue. We didn’t need Ivan Pavlov’s dog to teach us that, but we know what to call it.

Take a look at the apps on your phone. Most of them are designed not to minimize how much time you spend using them, but to increase your usage. Doom scrolling is not a flaw; it’s a feature. The app developers, and financial systems behind them, are incentivized to monetize your attention. But you knew that.

As with most Antagonists, when it comes to incentives, it’s what’s under the surface that needs a better look. The answer isn’t misalignment versus alignment, individualism versus culture, or motivation versus values. The Antagonist for incentives is implicit incentives: the rewards that go unnamed but everyone responds to.

Organizations have two incentive systems. The first is the formal one: compensation plans, bonus structures, performance reviews, MBOs, OKRs, KPIs. This is the system you can point to, document, and defend. The second is the real one. The real incentive system answers different questions like:

• Who matters?

• Who gets promoted or protected?

• Who shapes where we’re going?

• Who defines what success looks like?

• Who can fail safely?

• Who gets labeled “difficult,” “not a team player,” or “high maintenance”?

These incentives aren’t showing up on the employee intranet that everyone forgot how to access, but they are learned quickly. And once learned, they shape behavior more powerfully than any dashboard.

This is why implicit incentives are such a dangerous Antagonist.

Because people do what’s rewarded and avoid what isn’t. They notice that speaking up might result in fewer meeting invites. They notice when speed matters more than quality. They notice when loyalty to a person matters more than loyalty to the whole. They notice when risk is celebrated in language but punished in practice. They notice when the work they produce matters differently from the work others produce.

And once those lessons are learned, the incentive system is set, whether you intended it or not.

This is why adding more incentives rarely fixes the problem. You can layer on bonuses, redesign scorecards, or introduce new frameworks, but none of that matters if the implicit incentives remain untouched.

Leaders who want healthier incentive systems make the invisible visible. They name the real incentives out loud. They close the gap between what they praise and what they promote. They ensure that the behaviors required for the future aren’t penalized by the past.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. What behavior is most rewarded in your organization, regardless of what the metrics say?

2. Where do people play it safe because the real cost of failure is unclear?

3. How could you rally as a team against implicit incentives?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Tsuyoshi Kozu on Unsplash

If you’ve been working at the same company or in the same industry for any length of time, a recurring reflex in most organizations is around the idea of “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Whether this is a nod to tradition (the president always sends a holiday greeting in December) or an excuse for habitual defaults (we always meet at that time for the Monday Morning Start), doing it the way you’ve done it can feel normal, natural, even necessary. Why buck the system if it’s working?

I love change. I’m the kid who rearranged his bedroom way too often just because I wanted some variety. This isn’t a productivity argument because, as we are learning, the Antagonist is usually not that obvious.

Founded in 1888, Kodak built an empire by teaching people what to photograph and how to remember their lives. They made memory-keeping a global phenomenon. With slogans like “Let Kodak tell the story,” “You press the button, we do the rest,” and “Kodak moments,” they introduced a new way to capture and communicate life that could be shared for generations.

But Kodak had a difficult time separating the business they were in from how they made money. People weren’t paying for memory capture; they were paying for cameras, film, and film development. Why would Kodak want digital cameras when they make so much of their money on film and film development? Much like Blockbuster and the storefront movie rental behemoth they became, Blockbuster made most of its money on late fees. Why would Blockbuster go into the DVD-by-mail or streaming business, where you can’t charge people late fees?

Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but did little with it because it would cannibalize the business they thought they were in. In 2000, Blockbuster passed on its opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million.

Neither of these infamous corporate stories is unfamiliar, or even hostage to “that’s how we’ve always done it” mentality. I think it’s deeper. “That’s how we’ve always done it” is a phrase we use when we don’t know how to name what’s underneath.

What’s underneath is identity.

Kodak didn’t just sell film. Kodak believed it was film. Blockbuster didn’t just rent movies. Blockbuster believed it was the place people went to get movies. And once a company confuses its method for its mission, it stops adapting. It starts defending.

This is why those stories feel inevitable in hindsight. The leaders weren’t lazy. They weren’t stupid. They were faithful to a doctrine that had worked.

Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975 and then treated it like a threat. It could have been an engine. Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix because it couldn’t imagine entertainment without a store, and because its most profitable revenue stream (late fees) didn’t survive in the world that was coming.

These were failures of imagination under the weight of past success.

The late Chris Argyris gave leaders a useful distinction for moments like this. He called it double-loop learning: the ability to question not just the organization’s methods, but also the assumptions, goals, and beliefs beneath them.

Single-loop learning asks, How do we do this better? Double-loop learning asks, Should we still be doing this at all?

That second question is where organizations panic because it threatens more than strategy. It threatens status. It threatens competence. It threatens the story leaders have told themselves about why they’re winning.

In situations like Kodak or Blockbuster, their strategies had worked so well for so long. What began as a playbook became a belief system. And once a strategy becomes doctrine, it stops being tested and starts being protected.

That hardened strategy is the Antagonist because it’s familiar, proven, and probably once saved you. It quietly turns yesterday’s success into today’s ceiling.

The Antagonist is rarely the external disruption. It’s the internal refusal to reinterpret what disruption means. It’s the instinct to optimize the past rather than interrogate it.

Maybe you don’t need more innovation. Maybe you need more courage to ask better questions.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. What “best practice” in your organization has quietly become doctrine?

2. What assumption are you protecting because it has always worked?

3. How could you rally as a team against your current strategy?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Supradoc on Unsplash

There’s a version of leadership wisdom that insists conflict should be resolved quickly. Name it, smooth it over, get back to some form of agreement. Mature cultures seek harmony and treat tension like a bug, not a feature.

I don’t buy it. Some of the most formative counterforces in organizational history were not destroyed, but followed. The story of the Dassler brothers—Adi and Rudi—is one of those uncomfortable examples.

In Herzogenaurach, a small German town divided by a river, the split between the Dassler brothers began with suspicion. During World War II, a misunderstood remark in an air-raid shelter was taken personally, deepening fractures already forming from differences in temperament and wartime tensions. By 1948, the brothers’ shoe factory partnership was over. The town became divided; families, factories, even friendships aligned with one brother or the other. Adi turned inward to perfect the product; Rudi turned outward to conquer the market. What began as a breakdown became a boundary, and that boundary became the line each would spend a lifetime trying to outrun.

When the brothers split, the result was two companies—Adidas and Puma—each driven by a singular need to outdo the other.

The Adi and Rudi story includes an Antagonist that is personal, familial, and identity-laden. Each brother became the other’s reference point. The rival. The foil. The force against which the future emerged.

The Antagonist clarified who each company was becoming, and who it could not be.

This is where it gets uncomfortable, and understandably so. Family rivalry feels like the wrong moral lesson. No one wants to argue that broken relationships are a prerequisite for greatness. I’m not arguing that either. I’m arguing something narrower. And harder.

The Antagonist was already there.

Adi and Rudi didn’t seek rivalry to become successful. They were together in business for 30 years before World War II interfered. But their rivalry revealed a divergence that had been present all along. Different instincts. Different orientations. Different ways to win. Once that Antagonist surfaced, the system reorganized around it.

What’s easily missed in the Dassler story is not that antagonism existed, but that each brother followed it to its logical conclusion. They allowed the tension to pull them toward differentiation instead of forcing reconciliation for its own sake. The Antagonist became directional.

That’s the part leaders tend to avoid.

In organizations, antagonists often show up as people we struggle with. Partners who frustrate us. Executives whose instincts consistently oppose ours. Founders who pull in a different direction. We label these dynamics as problems to fix instead of signals to interpret.

But sometimes the Antagonist is right in front of us, pointing toward our future.

The danger is unexamined rivalry.

When antagonism remains unnamed, it turns toxic. When it is acknowledged and followed with discipline, it can become fuel. In the Dassler case, the Antagonist sharpened identity, accelerated innovation, and produced two enduring shoe brands.

In the Dassler story, the Antagonist was the other brother. That doesn’t mean every conflict should end in separation. The Dassler brothers could have reconciled rather than wait for their sons to do so a generation later.

The Antagonist can emerge as a fault line of difference, where values, instincts, and visions diverge. Ignore it, and it will work anyway, just underground.

Engage with it honestly, and it may reveal what you’re actually building.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. Who functions as an Antagonist in your leadership story, not as an enemy, but as a clarifying force?

2. If this Antagonist were directional rather than disruptive, where might it be pointing?

3. How could you rally as a team against unexamined rivalry?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Kajetan Powolny on Unsplash

Oft-repeated advice to senior leaders centers on alignment. Weekly meetings designed to sync, off-sites meant to integrate, and goals oriented toward a common target. When organizations struggle, the absence of alignment is blamed for silos, competing agendas, and aimless outcomes.

The popular cures are familiar: find consensus that can be committed to, break down silos, eliminate conflicting incentives, and resolve ambiguity at the top. In extreme cases, misalignment is treated as a leadership failure requiring reorganization or replacement.

The hard work of alignment matters. In his book, Re:Align, Jonathan Trevor makes the case that organizations should pursue alignment as a proactive strategy, rather than a reactive response to a failed one. He’s right. Alignment is coordinated commitment in the presence of difference.

But the Antagonist for alignment is sneaky. It often looks like consensus or disagreement. Sometimes it looks like misalignment or missed goals. But the real Antagonist of alignment is together. Together is the language of corporate community. It sounds healthy. It feels mature. It signals unity, cohesion, and shared purpose. But togetherness is not the same thing as alignment. It’s the misnomer that everyone is in. Together can feel like harmony, consensus, and even robust disagreement.

But together is a trap, especially for senior leaders. Whether it’s building or keeping a great company culture, presenting a unified front to customers or stakeholders, or going to bed at night with the comfort of congenial conciliation, this Antagonist must be confronted.

Together can exist without trust. Together can survive with or without clarity. Together can even coexist with disagreement.

In his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos articulated what has since become a widely quoted phrase: disagree and commit.

What makes the idea powerful is the discipline that follows disagreement: commitment.

But there is something deeper in Bezos’s insight. Disagree and commit only works if disagreement is real. And real disagreement requires differentiated perspectives. Without that, commitment is just compliance dressed up as unity.

This is where togetherness quietly undermines alignment.

In Failure of Nerve, Edwin H. Friedman argues that anxious systems over-focus on techniques, consensus, and sensitivity, rather than on leaders who take responsibility for their own clarity and direction. Friedman contends that healthy leadership is not consensus-driven but differentiated. A leader who knows where they stand, stays connected to others, and resists the pressure to disappear into togetherness when anxiety rises.

Alignment does not begin with agreement. It begins with leaders who are willing to be distinct.

This is why togetherness is such a powerful Antagonist. It offers the comfort of belonging without the cost of conviction. It allows organizations to feel aligned without ever being tested by real difference.

Organizations don’t lose alignment because people disagree. They lose it because distinct disagreement is softened to preserve harmony.

True alignment is people moving in the same direction without needing to stand in the same place.

Togetherness feels good. Alignment does something.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. How does the language of togetherness mislead your organization?

2. What does the differentiated perspective of the senior leader look like?

3. How could you rally as a team against the illusion of togetherness?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Mateusz Tworuszka on Unsplash

“There are very few bold plans that get me nervous. But this one is just too risky.” I love hearing these kinds of responses to the work I get to do with executive leaders. This is different from whiteboard moments, crazy ideas, or daydreaming. Those are made for reactions like this. But synthesize a real plan with real opportunities and implications, and it’s going to stir the nerves.

That nervous ‘butterfly’ energy is often dismissed as weakness. But it’s one of the clearest signals that something real is at stake.

Andy Grove liked to say that “only the paranoid survive,” and nowhere is that clearer than in the story of how he led Intel through its most terrifying strategic turning point. In the 1980s, Intel’s identity and revenue were built on memory chips, but Japanese competitors were relentlessly undercutting them and steadily eroding their margins and market share, even as Intel still had plants, plans, and products on the shelves. Grove describes the gnawing sense of dread he felt, the realization that if they stayed the course, Intel would slowly bleed out, not as a reason to back off their strategy, but as proof that the world had already changed and that clinging to the familiar would be fatal.

That terror became a signal, not a stop sign: he and CEO Gordon Moore made the agonizing decision to exit the very business that had made Intel famous and to bet the company on microprocessors instead. It was a choice that felt like jumping off a cliff with a partially built parachute, but that decision, born in fear and executed with conviction, is what transformed Intel from a vulnerable memory manufacturer into the dominant engine of the PC revolution.

Now, decades later, Intel finds itself at another crucible moment. Whether today’s leadership treats the unease they face as a jump scare, a warning sign, or a catalyst remains to be seen.

I heard an interview with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal of Acquired podcast fame. When discussing some of the work that goes into preparing for each of their episodic corporate storytelling deep dives, they said that terror is a major factor as they get closer to the moment of recording.

Terror can be a powerful Antagonist.

Not because it paralyzes, but because it clarifies. Terror shows up when the old map no longer fits the terrain, when the organization is still operating as if yesterday’s assumptions hold, even as reality has moved on.

Most teams treat that feeling as a flaw to overcome or a risk to manage away. The better ones learn to read it. Butterflies are not proof that the plan is wrong; they are often evidence that the plan might have just enough audacity to matter.

The question is not whether you feel terror. The question is what you do with it.

Ignore it, and you will preserve comfort at the cost of relevance. Listen to it, and terror becomes a signal, one that points toward the decisions that actually matter, the ones that reshape identity, strategy, and trajectory.

The Antagonist rarely announces itself loudly. Sometimes it arrives as a tightening in the chest, a sense that this choice matters more than you’d like. Teams that learn to trust that signal don’t eliminate fear. They convert it into conviction.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. Where does fear show up and how quickly do you try to silence it?

2. What decision feels too risky precisely because it would force you to abandon something familiar?

3. How could you rally as a team against areas that lack a little fear and trembling?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Risto Kokkonen on Unsplash

“Can’t we just have peace in the land?” This executive’s exasperation was innocent enough, but I couldn’t let it linger. “No sir, that is not your measure for success.” Behind his cry was an appeal for calm, comfort, and confidence that what he is leading and the way his organization operates is actually working. Fair enough, but dig a little deeper, and that pursuit becomes a desert mirage. A fantasy that feels fun to flirt with, but leads to an even deeper appetite for what will always remain elusive, especially at levels of executive leadership.

When calm becomes an aim for customer comments or a company’s culture, the Antagonist is winning, not you. Successful organizations do not succeed by avoiding chaos; they succeed by being willing to disrupt calm.

In the mid-2000s, Nokia was the undisputed global leader in mobile phones. Internally, the company culture was described as disciplined, deferential, and fearful of sharing difficult opinions or feedback, especially upward. This had the appearance of calm. Meetings were orderly because everyone was focused on what was discussed, not what needed to be discussed. Concerns were filtered carefully upward because the backlash from bad news could be brutal. Demotions and firings were commonplace.

After Apple’s iPhone launch in 2007, Nokia’s engineers saw the threat. Middle managers sensed the risk. Senior leaders, however, experienced calm. Market share was still strong. Revenue still looked healthy. The organization felt “under control.”

Post-mortems later revealed a culture where:

• Leaders asked for solutions, not problems.

• Dissent was interpreted as disloyalty.

• Conflict was managed out of the room before it reached the top.

A similar story played out at Boeing in the years leading up to the 737 MAX crisis. Boeing’s executive culture was widely described as controlled and confident. Financial targets were met. Schedules were tight. Concerns from engineers were escalated but repeatedly reframed to avoid disruption. The leadership experience remained calm even as the system beneath it grew brittle.

Nokia and Boeing did not fail because they lacked intelligence. They failed because calm was a signal of success. By the time urgency broke through the surface, the ground had already shifted.

Organizations that are experiencing the comforts that come with calm—hitting goals, retaining top talent, celebrating happy customers—should go deeper. Calm is the question, not the conclusion.

What tensions have been resolved too quickly? What contradictions are being smoothed over? What truths are being withheld in the name of stability?

Healthy organizations know how to use friction as a source of focus. They create space for disagreement before it becomes rupture. They surface risk while it is still theoretical, not catastrophic.

The Antagonist does not announce itself with chaos. It whispers through comfort. Leaders who learn to listen before the noise arrives discover that calm, properly disturbed, can become a productive force for good.

Calm is not the enemy because it is wrong. It is the enemy because it is insufficient. Treated as a signal rather than a destination, calm can become the starting point for clarity, alignment, and renewal. But only if leaders are willing to disturb it. On purpose.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. Where does stability feel earned, and where does it feel uncomfortable?

2. What conflict would you invite, assuming history will be kind to any backlash

3. How could you rally as a team against areas of stability?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Boris Misevic on Unsplash

Whether it’s the new employee figuring out how everything works or the long-time one who already knows, both are wise to keep a pulse on who’s in charge. Knowing where colleagues are on the org chart speaks to where priority should be given, who to give the nicer gift to, and where power really lies. Or so we’re led to believe.

While some organizations are less hierarchy-oriented than others, most still rely on a classic model of power being distributed from the top. Even in flatter organizations, in a socioacracy (decentralized, nested roles and circles), or in an agile networked context, power still comes from a source (e.g., board, stakeholders, owners) and is given to others.

Working closely with so many different kinds of senior leaders over the years, it’s easy to contrast clear and commanding direction with someone who is more collaborative, deferential, and trusting. Both extremes have their champions and challengers. And when it comes to this person being at the top of the org chart, for those downline, both approaches offer dramatically different ways to make decisions, measure effectiveness, and know where you stand.

And that difference is why hierarchy is such a reliable hiding place. Hierarchy gives people a clean excuse: “I’m just doing what I’m told.” It gives the senior leader a clean excuse, too: “That’s how the system works.”

Org charts are comforting because they feel like clarity. Boxes. Lines. Titles. Reporting relationships. A visible architecture of who answers to whom. For anxious systems, the org chart becomes a map that gives the illusion of certainty in a world that isn’t flat.

But the org chart is not the organization.

Reality is shaped by the person everyone goes to when something breaks.

Reality is shaped by who can say “no” without consequences.

Reality is shaped by who controls attention, resources, and risk.

Hierarchy claims to distribute power. In practice, it often disguises itself as process.

I’ve watched this play out in organizations that are deeply hierarchical and those that swear they aren’t. In the hierarchical ones, the dysfunction is obvious: layers, approvals, gatekeepers, slow decisions, political survival. In the flatter or more distributed ones, the dysfunction is subtler: invisible power, unclear accountability, and a culture that pretends hierarchy doesn’t exist while punishing anyone who names it.

Either way, hierarchy becomes the Antagonist when it stops being a tool and becomes a refuge. It becomes the place where leaders go to avoid responsibility and where teams go to avoid ownership. A common phrase in a hierarchy is: “That’s above my pay grade.”

And sometimes that sentiment is true. But more often, it’s a socially acceptable way to say, “Don’t attach my name to the outcome.”

Hierarchy is brilliant at absorbing risk. It gives organizations a way to move accountability upward until it disappears into a meeting nobody knows about, a leader who is too busy, or a decision that is never actually made. It creates a system where everyone can stay employed while nothing truly changes.

This is why org charts are so addictive in moments of uncertainty. When things feel unstable—missed numbers, shifting strategy, internal conflict, a leadership transition—the instinct is to redraw the boxes. Reassign reporting lines. Rename roles. Promote someone. Move a function.

But restructuring is not leadership.

Hierarchy is supposed to create speed, clarity, and coordination. When it becomes an Antagonist, it produces the opposite: hesitation, confusion, and distance.

The point here isn’t to abolish hierarchy but to stop defaulting to it. Org charts are useful, but they are not neutral.

They either clarify responsibility or they provide cover from it.

They either speed up decisions or they become a place to hide them.

They either serve the mission or quietly subvert it.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. Where is hierarchy being used as an excuse instead of a tool?

2. Where is there unclear ownership or responsibility, and what does that stem from?

3. How could you rally as a team against org-chart thinking?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

History does not favor calm consensus. It turns on tension, fracture, and fight. In a small German town, the Dassler brothers’ famous feud led to the creation of two rival brands—Puma and Adidas—dividing a workforce, a river, and even the way neighbors crossed the street. When Coke was caught off guard by the infamous “Pepsi Challenge,” it forced a reckoning with the story it had told itself for so long, that people prefer what they know rather than what they like. A young American nation nearly split in two because one half’s identity was at war with the other half’s ideology. The costs are still being paid today. In 1054, a mutual excommunication hardened theological tension into a permanent scar, splitting Christianity into East and West and shaping nations, liturgies, and loyalties for a thousand years.

Conflict is not a footnote to history; it is the engine. When pressure meets conviction, something breaks. And what emerges on the other side is never neutral.

Scratch the surface of any boardroom, conference room, or Zoom room, and the same forces are at work shaping decisions and outcomes: conflict, contradiction, and contrarian thinking. For executives and teams who know how to harness the power of the Antagonist, the future is theirs for the taking. For most, the Antagonist remains in the shadows: too risky to name, too disruptive to confront, too costly to activate.

The fastest way to align a group is to show them what must be overcome.

Organizations do not mobilize around abstract ideas. They might organize around mission statements, operating plans, and goals, but those are incomplete. If you want momentum, unity, and urgency, something must be overcome. A clearly named Antagonist reveals the common enemy for the common good.

Antagonist at Work is written for leaders who want to understand what they are up against, what they are fighting, and what is worth fighting for.

This is not about villainizing competitors, though competition matters. It is about the forces within and without that resist progress: habits, incentives, systems, stories, complacency, and contradictions that slow momentum.

The Antagonist is an organizing force. When named clearly, it sharpens strategy, clarifies identity, and rallies teams toward action. When left unnamed, it shapes culture anyway through drift, stagnation, and decay.

This content examines culture, schisms, struggles, and corporate conundrums with an eye toward what leaders can learn from them. Antagonist at Work explores how systems form, how strategies harden, how incentives distort, and how institutions fall back to familiar set points.

Leadership is not the elimination of antagonists. It is the discipline of naming them, aiming them, and preventing them from turning into scapegoats.

The Antagonist at Work is rarely a person and almost always a force. At first glance, it may look appealing because who doesn’t appreciate stability, tradition, alignment, loyalty, and growth? But look closer, and it may be quietly restraining the very progress you seek.

You can try to avoid it, bury it, or plan around it. But those efforts are futile. For those with the courage to face the opposition, the Antagonist becomes the driver of clarity, courage, and progress. Ignore it, and it will shape you anyway. Just without your consent.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

Put This Enemy to Work

1. What force inside your organization currently absorbs the most energy, but is rarely named?

2. If this Antagonist were made explicit, what decision would immediately become unavoidable?

3. How could you rally as a team against a force you have not named yet?

Does this content resonate?

Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.

Photo by Donea Constantin on Unsplash

“Where there is no conflict,
there is no movement.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The fastest way to align a group is to show them what must be overcome.

Organizations do not mobilize around abstract ideas. They can organize around mission statements, operating plans, and goals, but those are incomplete. If you want momentum, unity, and urgency, something must be overcome. A clearly named Antagonist reveals the common enemy for the common good.

Antagonist at Work is written for leaders who want to understand what they are up against, what they are fighting, and what is worth fighting for.

This is not about villainizing competitors, though competition matters. It is about the forces within and without that resist progress: habits, incentives, systems, stories, complacency, and contradictions that slow momentum.

The Antagonist is an organizing force. When named clearly, it sharpens strategy, clarifies identity, and rallies teams toward action. When left unnamed, it shapes culture anyway through drift, stagnation, and decay.

This content examines culture, schisms, struggles, and corporate conundrums with an eye toward what leaders can learn from them. Antagonist at Work explores how systems form, how strategies harden, how incentives distort, and how institutions fall back to familiar set points.

Leadership is not the elimination of antagonists. It is the discipline of naming them, aiming them, and preventing them from turning into scapegoats.

The Antagonist at Work is rarely a person and almost always a force. At first glance, it may look appealing because who doesn’t appreciate stability, tradition, alignment, loyalty, and growth? But look closer, and it may be quietly restraining the very progress you seek.

You can try to avoid it, bury it, or plan around it. But those efforts are futile. For those with the courage to face the opposition, the Antagonist becomes the driver of clarity, courage, and progress. Ignore it, and it will shape you anyway. Just without your consent.

The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?

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Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.