Success Quote by Rick Wagoner

Wagoner’s line has the blunt confidence of a boardroom proverb: pick the obvious winners, then treat the obvious as strategy. It’s also a tiny self-portrait of late-20th-century corporate logic, where complexity gets flattened into a sports metaphor because sports feels empirical, clean, and meritocratic. “The big and the fast beat the small and the fast” isn’t really about the NBA; it’s about permission. Size becomes destiny, speed becomes proof, and the messier variables - adaptability, design intelligence, timing, culture, regulation - get shoved off the court.

The phrasing is telling. He doesn’t say “best” or “smartest.” He says “big” and “fast,” the two adjectives most flattering to incumbents who already control capital, distribution, and political oxygen. The subtext is consolidation: in a winner-take-most economy, growth isn’t just a goal, it’s a survival narrative you can repeat to investors, employees, and yourself. If you’re “big,” you deserve to win; if you’re “fast,” you’re modern.

The NBA reference tries to launder corporate ambition through a familiar spectacle. But it also quietly misreads the sport. Basketball doesn’t reward mere size; it rewards coordinated movement, spacing, decision-making, and a system that turns individual talents into an advantage. That gap matters, because it hints at the broader context: executives reaching for tidy analogies right as their industries were being disrupted by smaller, nimbler players who were “fast” in a different way - not physically, but organizationally.