This is a false dichotomy. Why not both? Again, the sports metaphor breaks down, because winning and losing is a zero-sum game, whereas companies aren't necess

This is a false dichotomy. Why not both? Again, the sports metaphor breaks down, because winning and losing is a zero-sum game, whereas companies aren't necessarily playing a zero-sum game. Moreover, a team's draft position is inversely correlated with its record, so there's an incentive to "tank" to get better draft picks. ("Rebuilding" often means getting rid of your expensive best players and intentionally losing for a while.) No such analogous situation exists in business, it's just an arbitrary effect of how sports leagues are organized. It's actually designed that way to encourage competitive parity among teams, prevent any one team from dominating forever.