Some of the most interesting companies in the defense market today have an intensity about them that’s difficult to miss.

It isn’t necessarily that their people work longer hours. They don’t have more hours in the day, and many don’t have more people, money, customer access or institutional knowledge than the established companies they’re challenging. Often, they have considerably less.

What they do have is belief.

Across the company, there is a visceral sense that they are building something truly better. That the existing answer isn’t good enough. That what they’re doing has real value and that getting it into the hands of the customer matters.

You can feel the difference.

We’ve seen it repeatedly among the insurgents that have emerged in defense. Their language can border on evangelical. They talk about missions and movements. Some even write manifestos. They aren’t merely trying to win a contract; they’re going to change an industry.

I’m not particularly drawn to the manifesto language. And I’m certainly not suggesting anyone needs to die for the cause.

But I do think the rest of us should pay attention to the intensity.

Involved or Committed?

Years ago, my favorite Captain—now a retired Rear Admiral and a regular reader of this newsletter—gave me a lesson I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

“The hen is involved in breakfast,” he told me. “The pig is committed.”

I remember thinking I was already (pretty) committed. I was engaged. I worked hard. I cared about the mission and the team. What more was he looking for?

Only later did I appreciate what he was trying to tell me. There are degrees of commitment.

I subsequently tried to pass this wisdom along to my kids as one of those Dad lessons that seemed perfectly clear in my head. It landed with roughly the level of confusion you might expect. The hen and the pig have since joined the family collection of Dad’s pearls of wisdom, periodically resurrected at gatherings for everyone’s amusement.

But I’ve kept thinking about it because I see versions of the hen and the pig all over the defense ecosystem.

Established companies often possess extraordinary advantages: engineering depth, capital, facilities, customer relationships, contracting experience, congressional relationships and decades of institutional knowledge.

Then along comes an insurgent with a fraction of those resources and somehow begins changing the conversation.

Technology may explain part of it. Resources certainly help. Timing matters.

But don’t discount intensity.

The insurgent often has a disproportionate number of people who deeply believe the current answer is inadequate and theirs is better. That belief changes behavior. It changes how they talk about the problem, whom they recruit, how quickly they respond, how well they prepare and how willing they are to keep pushing when the system tells them to wait.

People outside the company can sense it. Customers. Investors. Congressional staff. Partners. Recruits. Reporters. Competitors.

Genuine conviction creates a kind of gravitational pull around a company that no communications plan can manufacture.

You Can’t Order People to Believe Harder

There is an important leadership challenge underneath all of this.

You can’t order people to believe harder.

Leaders create the conditions for intensity by giving people something worth believing in, making the objective clear, and demonstrating through their own behavior that it actually matters.

Think for a moment about two leaders in your own circle who fit that description.

Not necessarily the people who work the longest hours or send emails at 4:30 in the morning. Think about the people whose belief in what they’re doing is almost contagious. They enter a conversation with a level of preparation and conviction that raises everyone else’s game. They push. They ask another question. They don’t easily accept that something can’t be done simply because it hasn’t been done before.

You probably came up with two names pretty quickly.

What are they doing differently?

That’s one reason intensity can be so pronounced in insurgent companies. The distance between the person with the original conviction and the people doing the work is often very short. Everyone knows what they’re trying to change and why.

As companies grow, that distance can grow too. Strategy becomes a presentation. The mission becomes language on a website. The objective gets translated through layers of management. People can be exceptionally good at their jobs without feeling personally invested in the outcome.

The leadership challenge isn’t to demand more commitment.

It’s to close that distance.

What Would 10 Percent Look Like?

I think about intensity a little like an Orangetheory workout.

You don’t spend the entire hour in the red zone. You couldn’t, and trying to do so would probably make the workout less effective. Most of the time you’re operating at a sustainable level of effort (the orange zone). But periodically you’re asked to push—to deliberately close some of the distance between your current effort and what you’re actually capable of producing.

Companies have that distance too.

The objective isn’t maximal intensity. That’s unsustainable. Nobody needs to die for the cause, and burnout isn’t evidence of commitment.

But what if we turned the intensity dial up just 10 percent?

• Ten percent more preparation before the meeting that actually matters.
• Ten percent more willingness to challenge an assumption everyone else has accepted.
• Ten percent more urgency when an opening appears.
• Ten percent more curiosity about why the customer isn’t moving.
• Ten percent more conviction across the company that what you’re doing really is better.

Those aren’t heroic acts. But they compound. Ten-X sounds great, but ten percent will move the needle considerably.

The engineer pushes a little harder because she understands why the capability matters. The business development team tells the story with greater conviction because they’ve spent more time with the engineers. The government relations team recognizes the larger policy implication because they’re closer to the business. Leadership asks a better question because the information reaching them is sharper.

Then the engineer gets better feedback from the customer because the business development team asked a better question. The next conversation improves. The story gets sharper. Someone recognizes an opportunity that might otherwise have passed unnoticed.

Ten percent begins feeding the next 10 percent.

None of those things alone changes a market. Together, they might.

This isn’t an argument for longer hours, more calls, more meetings or a calendar with no white space.

Activity is a poor substitute for intensity.

A completely full calendar can be evidence of extraordinary commitment—or simply evidence of a completely full calendar to which no learning was applied.

Intensity is different. It is concentration of belief and effort against something consequential.

The companies changing markets seem to understand that.

They have plenty of hens. Every company needs them. Smart, hardworking people who contribute, produce and reliably do their jobs.

But somewhere inside the companies really pushing the market, there seem to be a few more pigs.

So go back to the two people you thought of earlier.

What do they do that you don’t?

Where is the distance between the intensity you’re applying today and the intensity you’re actually capable of bringing to something that matters?

You don’t need to live in the red zone. You don’t need a manifesto. And you certainly don’t need to sacrifice yourself for breakfast.

Maybe you just need another 10 percent.

The hen makes a perfectly respectable contribution.

The pig just has more at stake.