This Middle Finger Went to the Market
How to move faster by naming what won’t be tolerated
A galvanizing enemy is more powerful than an inspiring vision.
In 1973, Yvon Chouinard turned a small climbing-gear business into Patagonia. By the 1980s, he was donating 1% of sales to environmental groups. In 2022, he gave the entire company away, transferring ownership to a trust and nonprofit designed to funnel every dollar of profit into fighting climate change. Patagonia is a company that decided the planet’s unraveling was the enemy and built itself around the fight.
Likewise, payment processor Stripe built its business on eliminating friction in online commerce. Toyota organized an entire production system around the eradication of waste. Khan Academy is fighting educational inequality, and Duolingo is eliminating language barriers.
Each of these companies identified a force worth opposing and built everything around it.
In 2009, Yael Cohen’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, so she made a T-shirt that summed up the sentiment: Fuck Cancer. Years later, Cohen and Julie Greenbaum, who had launched F*ck Cancer in honor of her late mother, merged their organizations to rally against a resistance that put a middle finger to something emotionally resonant.
For organizations like these, the enemy is obvious. Cancer. Climate change. Inequality. Barriers to access. The stakes are clear, the opposition is named, and the work organizes around it. Most organizations talk about what they want to build, where they want to go, and how they want to grow, all of which matters. But without something to push against, the work stays abstract. It lacks urgency. It competes with everything else.
A named enemy changes the calculus. It becomes a decision filter. Patagonia can ask whether a product, supplier, or campaign advances the fight against environmental degradation. Toyota can trace thousands of improvements back to a single objective: eliminating waste. Stripe can evaluate features based on the amount of friction that can be tolerated, which is instantly measurable in real time. The enemy creates coherence. It aligns priorities, clarifies tradeoffs, and gives people a reason to care beyond the standard metrics.
A named enemy collapses ambiguity. Generic adversaries are diffuse, slow-moving, and impersonal. Giving the enemy a name and a middle finger turns an abstract misfortune into something you can stand against, which is psychologically much more activating than standing for something vague like “awareness.” It gives permission to real emotions, validating the rage people might feel against cancer or climate change, rather than asking them to relegate it to a 5k fun run.
A named enemy creates instant in-group cohesion (and sorts out people who might not be the right fit). Shared enemies bond humans faster than shared values, which take time to articulate and agree on. “We hate this thing together” is a complete social contract in five words.
When an organization can name what it refuses to tolerate, and define what it is willing to fight for, it activates an alignment that no org chart can produce.
Put This Antagonist to Work
In my work with senior leaders who are eager to mobilize their organizations with a sense of priority and urgency, I see that naming and framing the resistance is where so many get stuck. Decades of management tropes have focused on leading with vision or mission statements and aspirational language.
Here’s what I have found to be most constructive:
Find the fury and follow it. Yael and Julie didn’t sit in a strategy session to pick their adversary. They were already outraged, and the organization formed around the rage. Ask your team what genuinely makes them angry about the industry and its status quo. The answer is usually closer to your real enemy than your mission statement is.
Make the enemy specific enough to fight. “Inefficiency” is not an enemy. “The 14 days it takes to onboard a customer when it should take two” is. Vague adversaries produce vague responses. Toyota didn’t fight “slow,” it fought waste (muda in Japanese). Then they defined seven types of muda and integrated those definitions into their production system so employees knew what to look for on Monday morning.
Test it against the trade-offs. A real enemy forces you to say no to things. If naming yours doesn’t make some current project, partnership, or product look suddenly indefensible, you haven’t named it yet. Patagonia gave away the company. You know the enemy is real when it’s expensive to avoid.
Three Questions for Confronting This Antagonist
Consider these questions for your own reflection or to spark a team conversation.
What would your organization say “no more” to if it spoke honestly?
Where are you trying to inspire action without defining what must be resisted?
How could you rally as a team against a resistance that would make your priorities instantly clearer?
Organizations are born for all kinds of reasons, but nothing accelerates forward momentum like a middle finger to a problem worth fighting.
The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?
Does this Content Resonate?
Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.
After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.
So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than five minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.