With the recent melodrama on the US Women’s Ski team, I started thinking about competition and drive. It sounds as though everyone expects Vonn and Mancuso to be best friends and sacrifice for one another. Yes, they are teammates, but they are also competitors. They are individually striving for Gold because they know when they go home at night, it’s their medal, not the team’s.

This individual drive needs to bleed into the marketing and PR world. An industry, like a ski team, strives for the greater good, but is also looking out for their own interests. If everyone on the ski team practiced the same techniques and got the same times, no one person would advance, just as competitors in an industry. A little healthy competition can be good for the whole.

For example, Client A and Client M are working in the shoe industry, both striving to make a non-slip tennis shoe. Client A hires a world-famous engineer, and in an effort to keep up, Client M wants the same engineer, the same materials, the same everything. This isn’t going to get either shoe company a breakthrough, just a lot of the same thing in the market place. A company needs to foster a proactive and not reactive mentality by striving to try new things to break that ‘world record’ in the industry. From what I’ve read, Vonn and Mancuso are very different individuals who go about skiing in two very different ways—one learns by the book, while the other has natural skill; one uses commercial endorsements to further her career, while the other relies on excelling her sport; and so on… Yet each lady has medaled this year.

Instead of worrying about competitor initiatives and copycatting, be bold and be proactive. Strive for Gold every time, because someone has to get Silver and you don’t want to be it.