Today’s fetish for competition is dangerous nonsense

If you are in business, how do you think of your competitors? Are they friendly rivals and people to measure yourself against; or are they enemies to be exterminated: the company driven out of business and the workforce thrown onto the streets? If you work in a large organization, how do you see your colleagues? Are they the people you need to work with to get things done, who may also be your friends; or are they bitter rivals for promotion and threats to the security of your own position? Would you do something underhand to make sure that it was them and not you who got the push?

Most people, most of the time, prefer cooperation to competition. They prefer teamwork to conflict, and they generally try to be fair in their dealings with others. If this were not so, the human race would have died out a very long time ago. But organizations these days try to inculcate an almost pathological competitiveness among their staff and similar attitudes against other organizations. All of which benefits nobody in the end, besides ruining people’s health, happiness and careers.

The idea that got out and started to bite people

Like a lot of other halfway decent ideas, competition has escaped from a book and run riot. In the private sector, competition can be a good thing, but isn’t necessarily so in all cases. It can mean a wider choice and better value, but only if that is what companies compete to provide.

In most economies these days, companies compete only to make bigger profits, usually by cutting costs. The result — as we see now in the airline industry in the US — is a race to the bottom, providing ever cheaper and shoddier services. Likewise, a little internal competitiveness can be helpful, provided it’s kept under control. A salesman of the year competition, or a public selection process for top jobs, isn’t necessarily bad. But mostly it’s not kept under control. Organizations of all sorts, ever smaller and with ever more to do, are cheered on by a mindless culture of internal and external, psychotic competition in the media and among the ‘pundit-ocracy’. Even nations have to be ‘competitive’ or risk annihilation at the hands of others with lower social costs.

This is all total garbage, of course. Nations are not companies, and don’t go out of business. Nations are trading partners. Every buyer needs a seller, and the more prosperous a country is, the more of your goods it can import. Even among companies, cooperation is often the rule — Apple and Microsoft work together quite closely on some issues, in spite of what you might read about Darwinian competition to the death between them.

Darwin’s ‘big idea’ — only it wasn’t and it wasn’t even his.

Ah yes, Darwin — or actually not him, but some very silly and dangerous individuals known as the Social Darwinists, who in the 19th century recast human life as a struggle to the death, literally, between what they called ‘races’. After the mountain of corpses produced by the Second World War, it became a difficult idea to mention in polite company, but it’s staged a bizarre recovery recently in the columns of the financial media.

Economic Darwinism, let’s call it, is probably the dominant way of writing about economic issues today. It’s infected organizational thinking as well, even in the public sector. An average week’s headlines, as I write this, have included “Oil Prices are Killing the Airlines” and “AMD and its War with Intel”.

As a way of organizing an economy and a society, it’s as near useless as makes no difference: if it remains popular it’s because it serves the interests of certain powerful groups. Large institutional shareholders, top managers, bankers, management consultants — and lazy journalists looking for a metaphor to lean on. As a large shareholder, you can pit companies against each other, like a snake and a mongoose, until one dies of its wounds. As a manager you can avoid the nuisance of paying your employees decent wages, or organizing a career development system, if you can persuade them to compete for ever-decreasing numbers of jobs by voluntarily working longer and for less.

Economic Darwinism is a virus infecting how we think and how we speak

Consider for a moment what the phrase “i-pod killer” truly implies.

Most of the problems in organizations today are really problems of thought, not substance. Psychopathic competition now seems so natural and so ordinary, after a generation or more of propaganda for it, that we accept it as a description of reality, even if it conflicts with our sense of morality, never mind our common sense. But life is not war, business is not slaughter, and organizations are not arenas for gladiatorial combat.

Organizations and individuals that act as though such ideas are correct, are, surprisingly enough, not very successful, mostly because the theory, like its monstrous forbear, isn’t actually true. They will wind up destroying themselves, and many have already done so. The trouble is, they may destroy a lot of other things in the process.

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