And other rites of natural connection

Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998

(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

Interesting statistic: zoologists say the percentage of species of animals in the world that have achieved the bare minimum of socialness is no more than 20 percent. And what is the bare minimum benchmark? Whether or not the species has quibbles about eating its own young. Everywhere you look, if you can stomach the sight, nature reveals its dirty little secret:

• Tropical fish are known to regulate their own population levels by eating their excess young.
• Hyenas eat other hyenas.
• Lions, those noble creatures, have been known to attack competing herds and kill the young.
• For termites, cannibalism is a way of life. Every termite colony ever watched shows that they eat their own dead and injured.
• Then there is the wasp larva, embedded in a host insect, that at some strange timed moment in its development awakens, attacks and kills other larvae.

And if you are not literally gobbling them up, you can absorb and excrete them in analogous ways: downsizing, exploitation, violating their rights of property and privacy, terrorizing them on the job, lying, cheating, walking over them as if they were shag rug, not people.

Cannibals in nature have their reasons: the thinning of the herd, the strengthening of the strong at the expense of the weak. Among so-called primitive human tribes, cannibalism is ritually undertaken only for religious reasons: to ward off evil or to invoke a taboo. It is exceedingly rare, and works like homeopathy -- a little sin to chase away a bigger sin.

But then there is cannibalism for the hell of it. And that is what we see the most of. Your children, your neighbors, your competitors, your employees, your customers -- delicious! Cannibalism and sadism are such accepted ways of doing business, in nature and in business, that we cannot ignore them as a starting point.

But they are only the starting point. The behavior range on the scale of connectedness from wild to woolly. Here are the faces of competition in nature that also turn up in our place of work. As you read the descriptions, consider the character of your competitive relationships -- with colleagues, competitors, family, friends -- and how they differ.

• Simple competition. Simple competition, which corresponds roughly to win/lose thinking, is what happens when resources are limited and two or more creatures both want them. A misunderstood facet of simple competition is that the two creatures don't have to devour one another to "compete." They don't even have to fight. They just need to be after the same scarce thing, like breathing the same air or enjoying the same berry. If I eat your peanut, I don't need to fight you. We competed and you lost. I got the food and you didn't. This is more than biology; it's economics in a nutshell.
• Giraffes and elephants on the Serengeti Plain, hardly aggressive by disposition, are nevertheless highly competitive. In business all competition is of this sort: Lufthansa and British Airways wage war over market share, not the flesh of one another's boards of directors.
• Naturalist Edward O. Wilson, who brought the idea of connectedness in animals and humans to full flower in his book Sociobiology, links simple competition to the idea of scarcity:

• Competition can occur between members of the same species (dogs and dogs) or between different species (dogs and cats) and phyla (cats and catnip). It can and does occur between individuals, families, teams, groups, species, family businesses, corporations, nonprofit organizations, and whole societies.
• Predation. Surely you have sat and watched the death-and-mayhem popular videos being hawked on the tube: "Nature's Bloody Behavior," "Beasts Biting Each Other," and "Carnivores with Long Sharp Fingernails."
• What you will see is scene after scene illustrating the glories of the food chain. Alligators scarfing down flamingoes, preying mantises munching their husbands' chitin heads, wild jackals competing for first rights to some fetid corpse strewn along the desert floor.
• The lesson is simple: predatory competition, corresponding roughly to win/kill thinking, makes the natural world go around. What the predator image overlooks is that these seemingly supercompetitive creatures are also supercollaborative in their home lives. Wolves live and travel in packs, lions in prides. Relationships are terribly important to them. Wolves and eagles mate for life (not with one another, silly).
• This is the behavior the business magazines extol in supercompeters like CEOs who stop at nothing to trump their competitors, or corporate pirates of the 1980s like Carl Icahn or Kohlman Kravis Roberts who swooped down on befuddled companies and made off with corporate assets for distribution to investors before the victim knew what hit it.
• It occurs at the team level as well -- the unit that doesn't think it can win unless a parallel unit is made to lose.

Scattered among the usual competitive relationships are several which are unusually intense or occur only between certain individuals.

• Nemesis. This word from Greek mythology has come to mean "fateful enemy." Your nemesis is your sworn natural enemy, as you are its. Like a really bad marriage, these creatures are locked in a obsessive relationship only one can survive. The tarantula and the wasp are a perfect example: the wasp needs a hairy dead body to lay its eggs in, and the giant spider would prefer that didn't happen. Or the mongoose and cobra: the mongoose protects its long-term future (its eggs) from the cobra, who seeks short-term nourishment. One of the most feared creatures in all nature, the cobra wets its pants at the mere sight of a mongoose. In business we have instances of this peculiar strand of supercompetition: Sumitomo and Intel, Pepsi and Coke, MCI and British Telecom. One suspects at times, however, that the sworn enmity bit among these players is sometimes a ruse, that their nemesis relationship is a matter of convenience, like the winking agreement among George Orwell's global regions to take turns allying and making war against one another.
• Sibling rivalry. We looked on with horror on page 57 as identical twins John and Jim tried to pour exactly equal glasses of Pepsi. Sibling rivalry is an intense form of competition occurring within not just a species but a family. In sibling rivalry, children vie against one another despite parental disapproval, apparently out of mutually reinforced habit: You put me down, I put you down. In organizations, the analog is divisional competition, where business units within a larger business vie for resources and prestige -- often in the face of much more dangerous external competition.
• Imagine what it was like growing up in the Brennan household in Chicago in the 1940s, within sight of the Sears and Montgomery Wards mail centers. Edward and Bernie, four years apart, always vied to do the same things. During the 1970s, they worked together for Sears, with Bernie splitting when the rivalry grew too intense. Edward rose to the CEO position at Sears. Not to be outdone, Bernie commandeered Sears' lookalike rival Montgomery Wards. Both were harsh taskmasters, fighting some internal battle colleagues could only guess at. Edward was a bureaucrat by disposition, so Bernie was a ferocious anti-bureaucrat. But their opposite approaches were alike in their energy levels and fervor to succeed. Though his company wound up declaring bankruptcy first, Bernie was in many ways more successful with Wards than Edward was with Sears; point to Bernie. But neither Brennan was able to bring either of these old-line retailers back to glorious form.
• Parasitism. This is a sad form of competition in which one individual derives nourishment at the expense of another, usually by laying waste to its living tissues, and usually with the result that the "weaker" winds up destroying the "stronger." Unlike predators, parasites do not kill their hosts outright. Rather, they weaken them till they die by other causes.
• There is also a limited, nonfatal parasitism. Examples: one bird putting its eggs in another bird's nest. The cowbird and European cuckoo have somehow lost their instinct for nest building. The eagle that robs the osprey of its catch, then catches the fish before it hits the water.
• Parasitism occurs less between competing entities in business than it does between supposed stakeholders: "entitled" employees and suppliers with sweetheart deals, who drain a company of its resources while contributing little; customers who demand that mature products be supported ad infinitum, guaranteeing that a competitor with a fresh idea will overtake them; shareholders and raiders who extract wealth and sell off core assets; communities that soak businesses for the maximum amount of tax.

Nature also boasts five patterns we may describe as nearly-collaborative or fully collaborative:

• Familiarity. Directly between competition and collaboration on the connectedness scale is familiarity or family instinct. Familiarity is recognizing that something is the same as you, and according it special (non-devouring) treatment. The opposite of cannibalizing your young, it means cultivating them as family or clan. Parents of millions of animal species feed, care for, and teach their young. This is the bare minimum you might expect of "socialization," and thus does not qualify as fully collaborative, just as merely paying your employees will not win you employer of the year honors.
• Among humans, family marks the onset of civilization, the moment when the Brute stops fending only for himself and thinks about fending for others, when the hunter becomes a gatherer. Even extremely competitive people live with and work with their own families. It is the most collaborative they allow themselves to be -- because the family is seen as inside the same circle as the self. Everything outside the circle is still the enemy. But with supercompetitive people, that is the limit of their connectedness. They never allow others into their sense of community.
• One step beyond family feeling is community feeling. Animals live together and feel joint cause with one another. Lions in a pride hunt and feed together. Ants build robotic civilizations. People join together to form organizations.
• Family is where competitive and collaborative habits are learned. A healthy marriage is a collaboration, as is the assignment of chores and responsibilities to children. A family is a team in every sense, with a mission, goals, roles, policies, and rewards.
• But it is also the seedbed for competitive practices. A father who divides his estate into two parts, as in the story of Cain and Abel, or who divides his attention and love into two parts, creates a condition of scarcity that will haunt the children all their lives. To live as well as the parents, on half the resources, is a prescription for intense rivalry.
• Taken to the next level, familiarity is an entry-level requirement for healthy organizations. People may not hold hands and sing around a fire, but they recognize one another as belonging to the same group, and they do not eat each other. Us and not-us is still the defining difference between competition and collaboration: competers keep the portal as small and tight as possible, while collaborators year to widen the aperture for others.
• Association. One side benefits and the other neither gains nor is harmed. Those barnacles that live on a whale's flanks qualify, so long as they don't slow the whale down. When a large business comes to town, and every existing business perks up, that is the power of association. When Walt Disney World opened and a thousand other businesses sprang up at its front door, that was association in action. Disassociation also occurs. Ultimately, Disney decided it didn't want those barnacles feasting off its business, and bought them all out.
• Symbiosis. Literally, "living together," or mutualism, symbiosis is what symbionts do. You may recognize the word from Patti Hearst's involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army, an obscure group of radicals which kidnapped, murdered, and stole in the early 1970s, all in the name of living together.
• True symbiosis is a fully collaborative relationship in which close, permanent and obligatory contact exists. Example: the white egret you see standing on the backs of cattle throughout the southern United States. The bird gets the advantage of insects that are attracted to cattle, and the cattle get the benefit of professional exterminator service. Or the flashlight fish, which lures luminescent bacteria into its body, and then uses the fluorescent micro-creatures to light its way through the deep ocean, and signal others of its kind about sex and danger.
• The relationship between bees and flowers is exquisitely symbiotic: the bees feed on nectar while the flowers are cross-pollinated. It is a perfect win/win. We argue that symbiosis is at least as powerful as competition in building a successful organization.
• An obvious example of symbiotic businesses is Intel and Microsoft. One makes microchips, the other makes operating systems and applications that run on those chips. Consumers have called this dynamic the "Andy and Bill Show," after Intel CEO Andy Grove and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Each company profits immeasurably when the other succeeds in raising the bar of consumer expectations. In an industry where everyone sues everyone else, these two have never been anything but symbiotic, sharing and growing together -- and devouring one another's enemies.
• Many businesses have symbiotic relationships with other businesses without ever acknowledging those relationships. "We provide the legwork, they provide the brainpower." "We provide the muscle, they provide the money." Part of the transcompetitive art is identifying and honoring to keep these vital relationships healthy and long-lived.
• When people talk about teams, they are talking about a direct human analog to symbiosis. Teams are composed of people with different skill sets living side by side, profiting from one another's knowledge.
• Communalism. On the right end of the connectedness scale you have animals that are truly collaborative. In communalism the group is everything and the individual is nothing. There is only one role here, because pure collaboration has a great sameness about it: the negation of the individual and the exaltation of the group.
• Examples: bees in a hive, communism in its utopian form, monks in a monastery, the police force of a major city. A rich and ironic example is the body of followers any original thinker leaves behind -- their derivative style provides stark contrast to their departed leader's genius.
• Listen to biology-watcher Lewis Thomas rhapsodize about the power of termite connectedness:

• And that's just the beginning of termite connectedness. You may think that termites eat wood, but in truth they are unable to digest cellulose. To do that they require the help of as many as 40 different kinds of bacteria, spirochetes, and protozoa living in their gut. "Without their helpers, termites could chomp wood ad nauseam, but they'd starve to death."
• But wait, we're not done yet. One of the symbionts of the termites, a protozoan called a polymastigote, itself has symbionts -- thousands of spirochetes attached to it like hair on a dog. "propelled by these spirochetes, the polymastigote swims about the gut, scooping up and digesting wood fragment." Now that's community spirit.
• But lest we wax too rhapsodic about the communal life of termites, keep in mind that they are lusty cannibals of their own. You see, cannibalism occurs at both extremes of the connectedness scale.

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