An unlikely source of transcompetitive thinking
Excerpted from Transcompetition: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
Competition and capitalism are like an old married couple that eat together, walk together, and snore together in bed. But lately, just when it seemed they had smooth sailing till death did them part, a few cracks have been showing up in the relationship. Some of the world's foremost supercompeters have been indicating that enough is enough.
Lord knows the world needs more billionaires. In 1996, best estimates put the world's population of this species at 358. But they are not without resources. The combined wealth of these 358 people is neatly counterbalanced by the combined wealth of the world's 2.3 billion poorest people. So there is hope.
Consider the case of George Soros. A fabulously successful investor and one of the world's richest men, Soros has lived a dual life of commercial brutality and social philanthropy. In 1992 he made a currency play on the British pound that plunged the entire United Kingdom into monetary crisis. In business he has not cared if people get hurt, so long as he has fun. On the other hand, in one of those classic paradoxes of capitalism, he has given away many millions to support emerging eastern European nations. Perhaps his generosity is one way of atoning for that.
Another way has been his reconsideration, in recent years, of the competitive instinct itself. He has become a kind of armchair philosopher for an "open society," a balanced economic lifestyle in which people are free to do things, short of nailing one another to trees. It was odd to read this international predator saying in the Atlantic Monthly that unfettered competition posed a mortal challenge to continued civilization:
Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system -- which, however imperfect, qualifies as an "open society" -- is liable to break down.
I want to emphasize, however, that I am not putting laissez-faire capitalism in the same category as Nazism or communism. Totalitarian ideologies deliberately seek to destroy the open society; laissez-faire policies may endanger it, but only inadvertently.... Nevertheless, because communism and even socialism have been thoroughly discredited, I consider the threat from the laissez-faire side more potent today than the threat from totalitarian ideologies. We are enjoying a truly global market economy in which goods, services, capital, and even people move around quite freely, but we fail to recognize the need to sustain the values and institutions of an open society.
After Soros made his plea for an open society, the orthodox press nearly hooted him off the planet. Newsweek economist Robert J. Samuelson dismissed him as a "crackpot" writing "rambling, "incoherent" "rubbish," who had dared look sideways at the same free market that had made him rich. The New York Times followed with a sarcastic feature titled, "Look Who's Carping Most about Capitalism," lumping Soros together with other breast beating oligarchs, who met at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland to ponder ways of ameliorating the worst consequences of economic competitiveness -- why, for instance, it is so hard for a world loaded with food and other resources to feed its own hungry people.
Oddly, it is the billionaires who worry the most about the free market. The oil sheiks of the Mideast were the first to see that wealth creates disequilibrium, and disequilibrium invites turmoil -- the Brute cycle. American billionaire Ross Perot and British billionaires James Goldsmith and Paul McCartney have both sounded the trumpet against unrestricted free trade, Perot against NAFTA and Goldsmith and McCartney against the European Union.
Warren Buffett, the wizard of Berkshire Hathaway, was advising his own investors in mid-1997 to invest not in his stock but in index funds -- perhaps the most collaborative investment there is. Even Bill Gates, the monopolist of the age, is conscious of his image of being a predator in the information marketplace, and stages public relations events to display his collaborative side:
Even Microsoft, notoriously aloof from the communities it serves, has gotten in on the act. At the end of May, chairman and CEO Bill Gates visited Boston's Computer Museum and announced the company's donation of $100,000 in cash, software and hardware to expand the Museum's Computer Clubhouse -- an after-school learning environment designed to help young people become more comfortable with technology by exploring their own interests -- into under-served communities such as Roxbury and Boston's South End.
"Microsoft is working with a variety of partners across the country to help create a connected learning community, one in which parents, teachers, librarians, community advocates and museum directors can collaborate via the Internet on a child or an adult's lifelong learning," says Gates. "The Computer Museum is at the forefront of providing access to these technologies in disadvantaged communities."
But when the bullies are global, the consequences of their tumbling are, too. The competing mega-interests of the world fit together, according to Lester Thurow, like a set of tectonic plates. When one plate shifts, even slightly, as the Japan economy has from 1994 to 1997, the whole world trembles. The U.S. economy itself is no longer safe. When the Euro dollar finally comes on board in 1999, currency speculators like Soros will have a foil to turn to bring the dollar down. Imagine the mighty American economy, felled in the millennium year to put a few hundred billion in cash into a few opportunistic pockets.
If the billionaires are all wet, it will be a first. You don't become billionaires by being wrong. What their critics are really jumping on are some of the solutions Soros and others have put forth, requiring greater governmental restrictions on competition. Walling countries off against one another strikes supercompetitive free marketers as a ticket not to an "open society" but to local tyranny. Brute government is no cure for brute multinational business, they are saying; keep looking for another solution.
The paradigm of exchange, encircle, and exact is the other solution. It's really no more than the mice putting a bell around the cat -- a cat that tinkles everty time he takes a step is a lot less dangerous.
Does belling the cat constitute Karl Popper's "open society"? Probably not; the open society advocates always envisioned governmental discipline of business excess, a kind of economic United Nations.
But exchange, encircle, and exact is the best counterweight currently at our disposal -- awareness and joint action versus marketplace brutality. Brute cannot quash Brute any more than Rock can overcome Rock; only the combined force and knowledge of all assembled can paper over the misbehaviors of the neighborhood bully.
It isn't perfect by a long shot. There will always be bullies, corporate and individual, because it is in our nature as human beings to be diverse. Some vigorous figure will always be out there on the left side of the connectedness scale, cheerfully cheating, pillaging, and bulldozing his neighbor, and scoring each destructive act as a win.
And wouldn't it be nice if we could have the older, sober billionaires sit down and have a talk with the rising young billionaires, and explain to them the eventual emptiness of all that winning?
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