Want to Win? Don't Compete
It's been nagging at me that there's something not quite right with the underlying message in "how to create a winning company" books such as Trout's Differentiate or Die or Godin's Purple Cow. They get it half right, but in a way, they fail to recognize the radical message behind their wise counsel.
Late last night on the local cable access channel, I caught a lecture by Alfie Kohn, an educational psychologist and author of numerous books including No Contest: The Case Against Competition, and a light came on. The perpetual need to careen from victory to victory is like an addictive drug for many in our society, and it's built into the way we're schooled. Many of the most powerful and wealthiest members of society feel the most inadequate. It's a vicious circle. But it's a cultural habit, not a fundamental characteristic of human nature. Given my early programming, it's not a habit I personally expect to break easily.
So anyway, it hit me that Godin's message in Purple Cow actually lays bare the oversimplifications of his previous book, Survival is Not Enough. In particular, he alludes to Darwinian imagery to prove various points about the need for companies to adapt to better "compete," or else die - "survival of the fittest," if you will. But as we now know, the "survival of the fittest" talk is more Spencerian (the late sociologist Herbert Spencer, who actually used the phrase) than Darwinian, and more ideologically loaded than scientific. Darwin was adamant that adaptation was a fundamental aspect of evolution, but didn't take a narrow view of what kinds of adaptations were best.
Trout's Differentiate or Die carries similar baggage with it. Yet the real point of the book, like Godin's latest, is that the best adaptations are those which rescue companies from the need to compete at all. The concept of differentiation in business shows us one kind of adaptation that leads to success. But our list of non-competitive forms of adaptation should go beyond differentiation: it should also extend to forms of cooperation. Obviously there are countless examples of businesses which succeed through "coopetition" - and they succeed not based merely on exchange relationships (I give you something, you give me something), but because this helps avoid the destructive impacts of unnecessary competition.
(Want more proof? Do a Google search on phrases like cooperation and rationality, robert axelrod, altruism and human nature, game theory, experimental economics, facial expressions, etc. The universities are full of interdisciplinary work on these matters.)
The overcrowded ranks of tenured scholars likely have special access to this type of insight. An Alfie Kohn can't rise above the din, necessarily, by going head to head against radical education theorists like Ivan Illitch and Bowles and Gintis. Instead, he creates a slightly different lexicon, a slightly different persona, and presto. An original. (It probably helps if your name is Alfie.) And tenure is no doubt a great way of shielding the less competitive, but still highly productive, members of learned society from the Glengarry-Glen-Ross-esque imperative to be a "top quintile producer." At a certain point, though, people in certain professions really do have to produce more, and win more often. Management has the prerogative to negotiate "win-win" partnerships, but rank and file salespeople must make their quotas. At a certain point, for certain people, ivory tower theories spawned from computer game theories and anthropological accounts of the communicative benefits of trustworthy facial expressions and gestures amongst gorillas break down.
In any case, the "business differentiation" theorists teach us important lessons - but what they don't teach us (in fact, quite the opposite) is that there is a perpetual need for good people and good companies to destroy one another for their own good and for the general good. Even Microsoft knows this. It doesn't kill all of its competitors. It cripples them, then takes an equity stake to give them a perch to ensure that they remain "cooperative." :)
So, if you're still clinging to that adolescent infatuation with Ayn Rand, move on. Keep it up, and you're likely to die broke and lonely.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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