Having a clear and durable North Star, aligned stakeholders, adaptability and execution discipline are what creates trust and permission to grow.
If you want to understand how influence really works, how movements are built, how narratives shift, and how organizations turn ideas into outcomes don’t just study political history. Study the companies and leaders that have mastered it, sometimes after failing first, and adapting their strategies to change outcomes when external realities shift.
The Acquired podcast is very skilled at drawing out these case studies. Their deep dives into the NFL, Walt Disney, and Trader Joe’s are playbooks. Lesser told case studies of a company like S&P Global may be equally instructive lessons on strategic transformation and brand and issue led advocacy of the last half century.
Highlight reels often leave out the reality. None of these organizations or sectors won on the first try. Walt Disney went bankrupt. The NFL nearly collapsed under the weight of competing leagues. Joe Coulombe ran a struggling 7-Eleven clone before he figured out what Trader Joe’s was supposed to be. S&P Global spent decades better known for textbooks than for the financial benchmarks that power the global economy and almost lost that market leading legacy during the financial crisis.
What separated all of them wasn’t a clean path to victory. It was a North Star they refused to abandon, or adapted to redefine, with data driven rigor and discipline from their executives, their Boards, their employees, and mutually invested and interested stakeholders. And ultimately the fortitude to never let critics write their story for them.
That’s the real playbook. And it translates directly into business advocacy, trust, market positioning, and policy influence. In other words, having a clear and durable North Star, aligned stakeholders, adaptability and execution discipline are what creates trust and permission to grow.
Roi Ewell, Founder of Ewell & Associates, a former industry affairs and human resources executive with Anheuser-Busch Companies and SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment, said “High-performing companies establish a clear North Star that aligns the organization and guides countless decisions, even amid changing external conditions. The true test of a durable North Star is its capacity to clarify trade-offs and facilitate saying no to good ideas that don’t support the primary goal.”
Know What You’re Actually Trying to Move
Many organizations stumble out of the gate by trying to do everything at once and moving nothing. Or worse, spending so much energy chasing ghosts from the last war and responding to opponents that they forget to advance their own agenda.
The McGraw-Hill Companies spent most of the 20th century as a sprawling conglomerate in textbooks, education publishing, broadcasting, financial data, ratings. Ultimately doing many things competently and none of them dominantly. The decisive moment came when leadership made a hard choice to shed the legacy identity, divest the education division to Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion in 2012, and commit completely to being the world’s essential provider of financial intelligence. As then CEO Harold McGraw III put it, the goal was to create “two powerful companies, each with highly focused strategies.” They stopped trying to be everything and chose to own one conversation – the intelligence that powers global markets.
Several years later the 2016 rebrand from McGraw Hill Financial to S&P Global was much more than a name change. It marked the company’s shift away from its legacy McGraw-Hill identity and toward a clearer, higher value position as a global provider of ratings, benchmarks, analytics and data.
Under Doug Peterson, former President and CEO, S&P Global, the company became more focused, more global and more valuable. He refocused the portfolio around financial data and analytics, divested non-core businesses, acquired SNL Financial, Kensho and IHS Markit, and helped grow market capitalization from approximately $16 billion to $150 billion, while returning more than $30 billion to shareholders.
What made Doug’s leadership especially important was the context. He took over S&P’s Ratings business after the financial crisis, when trust in ratings agencies had been deeply damaged, and then became CEO in 2013. His tenure was really a case study in post-crisis leadership. By creating and defining a clear North Star, rebuilding credibility with stakeholders even as geopolitical complexity increased, simplifying the business, investing in innovation, he turned a company with existential reputational baggage into one of the most respected financial intelligence platforms in the world.
Trader Joe’s did the same. Rather than respond to 7-Eleven’s westward expansion by trying to outconvenience them, founder Joe Coulombe retreated, reconsidered, and came back with a completely different vision to own one specific demographic, the educated, well-traveled, value conscious consumers and build everything in service of that choice. He failed first, of course. The failure wasn’t the end of the story. It was the prerequisite to the real one. The result is a retailer generating over $2,000 in sales per square foot which is nearly four times the industry average by refusing to compete on someone else’s terms.
Lesson: Before you map stakeholders or build coalitions, get ruthlessly clear on what needle you’re trying to move. Define the conversation you want to own. Then build everything else in service of turning it.
Start with Obsessive Research and Precision Targeting
The NFL didn’t become America’s dominant media property by broadcasting to everyone equally. Commissioner Bert Bell’s foundational insight that “on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other” was about engineering a product where every market, every fan base, and every demographic had a genuine reason to stay engaged. But the NFL stumbled badly before it stuck the landing. The league nearly fractured under the AFL’s challenge in the 1960s, and the owners’ instinct toward self-interest almost destroyed the collective model before it could prove itself. What held it together was a shared belief in the bigger vision, that growing the pie together would outperform any individual team trying to win the revenue war alone.
Apply that same discipline to your campaigns.
Lesson: Segment your outreach to the zip code level. Be strategic about which channel earns your investment. Build your brand deeply on one platform before spreading thin across all of them. Layer in behavioral signals and stated preferences. The goal is relevance. Capture attention, then deliver hyper-tailored solutions to distinct groups who feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
Map the Network of Influence, Not Just the Decision Maker
The biggest stakeholder mistake organizations make is targeting only the person at the top like the elected official, the cabinet secretary, the CEO. Real influence flows through networks, and it accumulates over time, not overnight.
The NFL understood this instinctively. Monday Night Football was a calculated move to embed the league into a new ring of cultural influence. The networks became invested partners in growing the product. Each new ring, broadcasters, advertisers, fantasy platforms, streaming services, social media and influencers made the league harder to ignore and harder to dislodge. Critics called it an expensive vanity project when it launched. The NFL didn’t let that narrative take hold.
S&P Global built its influence rings through the unmatched credibility of its benchmarks becoming so deeply embedded in global financial infrastructure that decisions couldn’t be made without them. The S&P 500 became the market’s North Star. That embedded authority translated into policy influence, regulatory standing, and a coalition of stakeholders, asset managers, governments, corporations, regulators that all had a vested interest in S&P’s continued centrality. That became an insurance policy for survival when times were difficult during and after the financial crisis.
Lesson: Think in those same rings for your own campaigns. Who sits in the inner circle around your decision maker? Who are the two or three outer rings whose opinions carry weight at the center? A city council member may not take your call, but they will listen to the chamber president who golfs with their former chief of staff. Map those networks deliberately. Invest in every ring, not just the top. There is incredible and untapped strength in weak ties so make sure you use them. And do it early, consistently and often so you have that insurance policy when the tide inevitably turns.
Facts Inform. Stories Persuade. And the Story Has to Be Yours.
No organization in history has understood storytelling more completely than Walt Disney. Disney is built less on product superiority but on stories and memories people carry with them for a lifetime. Disney’s own story was nearly written by its failures. What Walt Disney never did was let the skeptics set the terms of debate. He kept building, letting the product make the argument. The flywheel he built (arguably the most cited marketing model even today) where films fed parks, parks deepened characters, characters sold merchandise, and merchandise brought families back to the films wasn’t a strategic plan so much as the compounding result of a man who knew what he was building and refused to be distracted from it.
S&P Global executed a parallel narrative transformation. For generations, the McGraw-Hill name conjured textbooks. The publishing business was a proud legacy but hardly the identity of a global financial intelligence powerhouse. The deliberate decision to rebrand as S&P Global in 2016 wasn’t cosmetic. It was a story told to every stakeholder simultaneously: to investors, signaling a pure play data and analytics company; to governments and regulators, signaling a global standard setter; to customers, signaling the essential intelligence they needed to make decisions with conviction. As Peterson said plainly: “No more textbooks. We’ll be 100% in analytics, data, and benchmarks.” The story preceded the strategy and the strategy validated the story.
Lesson: Take your facts and build stories around them. Feature the manufacturer who reduced compliance costs by 40% through targeted policy engagement. The healthcare nonprofit that reached 10,000 more patients through a reimbursement reform they helped shape. Translate complex goals into relatable human language. Speak to what your stakeholders care about, not just what you care about. And never cede the narrative to your opposition.
Start with Clarity Before You Execute
Most organizations are anxious to address the symptom before they diagnose the problem. And they launch tactics before they’ve established alignment. Teams will continue to pull in different directions. Priorities compete and any existing or desired narrative fractures. And when the first setback hits, there’s no shared North Star to return to.
Walt Disney had one. The NFL owners found one when they stopped trying to out compete each other. Joe Coulombe built one in a California cabin when he decided to stop cloning 7-Elevens. Doug Peterson clarified S&P Global’s North Star by having the courage to shed a century of publishing identity and declare exactly what it intended to become.
As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote in, Built to Last, “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” That is the work VantageRoad Partners helps leaders do: define the North Star, align strategy, culture, reputation, and stakeholder trust around it, and turn that alignment into real-world outcomes.
That’s why every engagement at VantageRoad Partners begins with the Rapid Alignment Diagnostic(RAD) and the VR Alignment SystemSM proprietary methodologies that identify emerging challenges, hidden opportunities, and the gaps between strategic vision and operating reality. It creates the clarity and momentum needed to move critical initiatives forward and to stay the course when the path gets complicated, as it always does.
Put the Right Partners Behind the Strategy
VantageRoad’s partnerships play a role in our work as strategic integrators of alignment. Executing at this level requires both specialized intelligence and disciplined execution. Penta brings deep stakeholder insight. Tunnl enables precision audience targeting. PublicRelay helps leaders understand how media, sentiment, message pull-through, competitive positioning, and emerging narratives are shaping reputation. Statt provides the policy and regulatory intelligence needed to spot signals early and translate developments into actionable briefs, maps, and advocacy materials. Terakeet shapes the digital presence decision makers find when they go looking.
VantageRoad Partners brings these capabilities together with a deep bench of advisors and partners. We help leaders understand who matters, how to reach them, how the narrative is moving, where policy is headed, and what people find when they search their brand. Then we turn that intelligence into strategy, execution, and judgment. In a world shaped by AI, disruption, and shifting stakeholder expectations, that kind of embedded partnership is not a luxury. It is a competitive advantage.