Why Everyone Believes They Will Win

…and How Pgo, Pwin, and Pwhen Separate the Winners from those Who Only Think They Will

“The conference room was too small for the number of people in it, and everyone knew it. Business development, engineers, and proposal team members leaned against the walls; pricing analysts hovered near the door; the capture director sat at the head of the table, flipping through a thick slide deck with the slow, deliberate certainty of someone who believed, or needed to believe, that everything was under control.

That morning, the company’s executive leadership team would review the top pursuits in the pipeline. One pursuit dominated all discussion: a single-award, must-win program worth over a billion dollars in lifetime revenue. The kind of opportunity that defined careers. The kind that reshaped portfolios.

On the second slide, the number appeared in bold blue text:

Pwin: 60%

The room exhaled; 60% was comforting, confident, defensible. The Pursuit Director explained the rationale: strong customer relationships, a differentiated technical approach, a favorable price-to-win assessment. Heads nodded. Executives asked questions, but only the polite kind. Everyone wanted this number to be true.”

But was it true? Read the rest of the story here: