B players aren't underperformers. They're competitors. Not competitors against your rivals. Competitors against your team. Every organization runs on an agreed-upon game: here's the goal, here are the rules, here's what winning looks like. A players play that game. C players fail

They fail because the default motivational state underneath most organizations makes execution structurally impossible. There are only two motivational states a team can be in. The first is performance orientation. Teams regulate their effort based on progress signals — real scores, real feedback, real distance between here and the objective. The