Winner Gets Fuel

Check whether current success controls future resource allocation and starves the alternatives.

On your team, Priya gets the high-visibility projects because she delivered well last quarter. Those projects come with executive exposure and the best support, so she delivers well again, so she gets the next one. Meanwhile two teammates you suspect are equally capable have not had a real chance in a year, and their reviews are starting to reflect it.

Winner Gets Fuel is a check on whether current success controls future resource allocation and thereby starves the alternatives. The cue is a widening gap between a favorite and the rest, in performance, attention, or opportunity. The operation: name the resource being allocated (stretch projects, budget, your mentoring time), ask who decides the allocation and what signal they use, then check whether that signal is mostly a product of past allocation rather than underlying ability. If yes, the ranking you trust is partly self-manufactured, and you should deliberately route some fuel to the starved options to get honest information about them. What changes is that you distinguish earned advantage from compounding advantage. Do not dismantle every success-to-resources link; when the winner's edge is real and the stakes are high, feeding the winner is often correct.