Success Quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Winning, in Rosabeth Moss Kanter's framing, is less a champagne moment than a risk-management discipline. "The goal of winning is not losing two times in a row" yanks victory down from the mythic pedestal and plants it in the unglamorous terrain of consistency. The line is almost stubbornly modest: it doesn't promise dominance, genius, or even a positive streak. It argues that the real enemy is the second loss - the slide from a setback into a pattern.

That specific intent makes sense coming from a business thinker attuned to organizational behavior. Companies and careers don't usually implode because of one bad quarter, one failed launch, one misread market. They implode because the first failure triggers panic, blame, and freeze-ups that make the next failure more likely. Kanter's subtext is about preventing the psychological and cultural cascade: protecting morale, keeping decision-making intact, and retaining the capacity to learn. It's a quote aimed as much at leaders as at individual performers: your job is to build systems that metabolize loss without turning it into identity.

The rhetoric works because it sneaks a demanding standard inside a humble one. "Not losing twice" sounds easy until you realize what it requires: feedback loops, resilience, rapid iteration, and the maturity to treat errors as data rather than verdicts. It's a decidedly modern definition of winning: not perfection, but uninterrupted recovery.