Defeat requires you to re-examine your whole approach. "How could this have happened? Where did our efforts stray from the useful and necessary?" It's an opportunity to find and promote new leaders -– younger, bolder, plainspoken men who've had their "boots on the ground" out there. They then get a chance to rebuild based not on fantasy or time-worn "rules," but on facts newly confronted. Old assumptions get thrown out with the garbage.

Thus, losers often get back in the game. A coach shocks the fans by trading away his aging "franchise stars" for future draft picks, and builds a new team on new principles – Jimmy Johnson's Cowboys.

Defeated in a battle of fixed lines in 1918, the German military decides not to attack the French Maginot line in 1940, at all, but to knife their way around it -– through the Ardennes and straight to Paris. (The French army, lulled into complacency by its 1918 victory, was famously left sitting in a bunch of fortresses with their fixed guns pointing the wrong way. They actually had more tanks than the Germans, but none where they were needed.)