Naming a real competitor, regulator, or market threat as the company's focus lets warring factions stand down without losing face, and makes continued infighting look petty next to the stakes.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
A regional telecom carrier had spent a year in a turf fight between its consumer and business divisions over who owned the fiber build budget. The chief executive opened the January leadership meeting with one slide: a map of the 140 towns where a cable competitor had announced gigabit service, laid over the carrier's highest-margin customers. She did not mention the budget dispute. She asked both division heads for a joint plan covering the 30 most exposed towns within three weeks, and she showed the map again at the next two all-hands meetings with the competitor's prices beside the carrier's. The consumer head, who had refused for months to share field crews, offered two crews in the first week. The joint plan came in on time, with one budget and one owner.
Why it works
A credible outside threat works all four ways. Cooperation across factions looks better, because it becomes the serious, loyal thing to do. It also gets easier, since a faction can drop an old position without appearing to lose to its rival: it is turning to the real fight. Continued infighting looks worse, because the prize now seems small next to the threat, and costlier, because persisting invites the charge of putting ambition above the company. All of this rests on a threat that is real and visible to staff in their own work, a leader with the standing to name it, and no one able to recast it as a scapegoat for internal failures.
The thinking behind it
Muzafer Sherif Superordinate goals, from Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (1961): in a 1954 field experiment, contact alone did not end hostility between two rival groups of boys, while problems that mattered to both and that neither could solve alone did. A real outside competitor is a superordinate goal for warring divisions, and the joint task with a near deadline is what turns the shared threat into cooperation.
Murray Edelman Constructed enemies, from Constructing the Political Spectacle (1988): problems, leaders, and enemies are constructed and interpreted for an audience, so naming one is itself a political act. Choosing which competitor to name, and how, shapes what the organization believes is going on. Edelman's account also marks this page's line: an enemy inflated to serve the leader, or an internal critic cast as one, is the construction he described.
When it fits
The situation is a real competitor, regulator, or market shift gaining on the company while internal disputes burn time the company does not have. You need the standing to speak to the whole organization, usually as chief executive or division head, and the threat has to show up in numbers staff can see and in their customers' behavior. It works best while the factions are still close enough to reunite.
How to use it well
Pick a threat that is concrete, named, and durable. A structural competitor or a permanent rule change holds up longer than one rival's good quarter. Show it with evidence staff can check against their own work.
- Name it in specific terms: who, where, which customers, at what prices.
- Leave the internal dispute unmentioned, and give the factions a joint task against the threat with a near deadline.
- Repeat the message in every forum for a season, with fresh evidence each time.
- Decide early how you will declare progress, so the story can end before it wears out.
What it costs and where it backfires
Vividness, the thing that makes the threat work, is also your exposure. If the threat later proves smaller than you said, your credibility drops quickly and is hard to rebuild, and the next warning gets discounted. A rival can recast your enemy as a scapegoat for internal failures, and that reading spreads fast when it is partly true. Two limits apply: the truth of the threat and the treatment of critics. Inflating the threat to buy unity is a lie, branding internal critics as disloyal is intimidation, and the people you united will remember both.
When it is used on you
Test the threat against your own work and the numbers whenever a leader suddenly makes a competitor or regulator the theme of every meeting. If it is real, the cooperation it asks for may well serve the company. If it looks exaggerated, or seems to cover internal problems that are the real cause, ask about those problems directly, in a forum where the answer is recorded.