How it varies from people to people

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

(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

The two of us are Americans, and Midwesterners, at that -- the most provincial kind. So we have to work to avoid the American chauvinism that applies to competition.

To us, competition looks American. No country has erected as many shrines to competition as the USA. Competition, free enterprise, and equal opportunity are the cornerstones of their constitution and laws. Professional sports, railroad barons, and corporate raiders follow as direct corollaries.

"May the best man win" is a sacred mantra to Americans. It transmutes their highest civic value, personal liberty, into the opportunity to do the best thing people can do, in our minds -- win.

Sure, Americans talk about rooting for the underdog, and they pay homage at the base of the Statue of Liberty to the sacredness of the lowly masses they have taken in. But their strong preference is for underdogs who triumph in the end, like Rocky and the Karate Kid. If the huddled masses don't get their act together within a generation or two, Americans say the hell with them.

Deep down, Americans treasure the lessons of competition: that there is an inherent pecking order in all things, and that spirited contests between individuals and groups are nature's way of settling differences.

Other styles of competing

But while America defines a strong flavor of competition, it has no lock on competition. Other peoples have gone other ways with it, and each has developed its own flavor. Japan may not have heard of Vince Lombardi, but their sports and business contests are every bit as brutal as anything the Green Bay Packers ever did.

It gets interesting when competition overflows national borders, and the flavors are forced to mix. IBM and Fujitsu and Siemens are locked in a global contest to sell information systems and services. But each defines the contest in ways peculiar to the culture it arises in. Likewise, the world is a village market for the bankers of Berlin, Tokyo and New York to lend money to. But loan talks with representatives of Sumitomo or Daiwa will be very different from talks with Citicorp, Chemical Bank, or the Deutsche Bank.

A good example of cultural competitive differences appears in Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man, about the 120-year-old Jack Crabbe, who lived two lives in the Wild West, one as a white man and one as an adopted Pawnee brave. The settler cultural was supercompetitive. "First come, first served" was the essence of homesteading. "Shoot to kill" was their method of resolving disputes. The Pawnees, being tribal, were supercollaborative by nature, and they resolved many disputes ritually. A mock battle using coup-sticks, in which the enemy is embarrassed rather than hurt, was one of these.

Both methods worked well enough within cultural bounds, but were toxic when cultures mixed. A Pawnee seeing a man with a rifle thought it was a gesture of ritual intimidation, while a white settler seeing a brave brandishing a coup-stick saw it as a clear physical danger. By the time the one culture understood what the other meant, the other was nearly extinct.

Let's look at competitive business cultures today that are clashing because of globalization.

On the one hand, we have the competitive culture that everyone is familiar with, America's. Americans believe in liberty for individuals above all else. So we are a nation of scrambling individualists, inventing, wild, often violent, and often a bit confused -- but extraordinarily vital, because self-interest compels us to differentiate like mad. We affiliate -- but ever so loosely. We long ago invented drive-through church services, and have moved on to even looser vehicles of connectedness -- cell-phones, e-mail, and car-fax.

But compare the way Americans connect in business versus the collaborative style of doing business in Japan. When the Japanese industrial breakthrough occurred in the 1970s, books were written about Japan being a "samurai nation." Americans, who had done battle with the Japanese fairly recently, and were aware of how ferocious they could be, took samurai to mean "warrior," as in all the samurai swords brought home by GIs. Conclusion: the Japanese were warriors who were going to hack us to bits, Toshiro Mifune-style.

What we neglected to do was look up the word samurai in the dictionary. Its meaning is simply "to serve." In Japan's collaborative culture, there is no aspiration as lofty or as ennobling as the humble process of serving others. This collaborative notion is what underlies the terrific success Japan has with its work teams, and its networks of interlocking industries (called keiretsus):

The word keiretsu does not translate neatly into English, and that is the beginning of the problem. The most common Japanese meaning is something close to the English verbs "link," "affiliate with," or "connect to."

A keiretsu can be anything from a network of thousands of companies all working for a single large firm, to something even more stupendous, a brotherhood of dozens of enormous firms, joined together -- plus all the thousands of companies that link to them. That's what is meant by the phrase "Japan, Inc."

It's all hard for Americans to conceive of. We like our big things to be discreet and object-like: Babe Ruth, dinosaurs, redwood trees, $7 trillion debt loads. We are disappointed to discover the largest living thing is a collaborative effort: a huge fungus growing on the forest floor in Northern Michigan. Altogether the thing is 37 acres across, weighs 10,000 tons, and is estimated to be 1,500 years old. But it is unphotographable -- no frame can contain it.

Anyway, it is very hard for Americans and Japanese to understand the competition they find themselves in, because our values are so different.

Differences in competitive styles may have nothing to do with the United States, of course; countries can get plenty confused without our help. Asian managers, for instance, have had a dickens of a time meshing with Mexican workers:

What happens when Asia's workaholics, accustomed to employment for life, meet a Mexican labor pool where 20 percent turnover per month is not unusual? Alan Wong, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council's director of the Americas, baldly replies: "It makes it difficult."

Asian firms cope with this culture gap in several ways. Some executives have applied a global manufacturing mindset anchored in the home country, such as Samsung Chemicals, which produces television sets in 20 countries.

Sanyo's Carlos de Orduña makes the necessary allowances. He gives a 6- to 12-month adjustment period for entry-level people. After that, workers who cannot meet Japanese quality standards either weed themselves out or are dismissed. "We hire workers who are willing to learn," he says. "We want workers who are proud to say that a television made in Mexico is good enough to be exported to Japan."

What we learn as we traverse the globe is that different people have stumbled upon different ways of doing things. Where Europe is doggedly competitive, Africa is just as determined to be supercollaborative in its approach -- possibly even as a response to European imperialism. The Shona tribe of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, for instance, are a Bantu-speaking people numbering nearly 9 million. As the Belgian and English and French and Dutch invaded Africa in the 19th Century, groups like the Shona had to hunker down in their own values to prevent assimilation and destruction.

Out of this defensive attitude arose a social philosophy called Ubuntu, which permeates the village cultures of southern Africa, and, according to South African consultant and author Lovemore Mbigi, extends to protect African people everywhere in the world, from Brixton to Harlem:

The cardinal belief of Ubuntu is that a man can only be a man through others. [It emphasizes] the need to harness the solidarity tendency of the African people in developing management practices and approaches. They have to stick together on selective survival issues and unquestioning conformity is expected from everyone on these issues.

So while Peace Corps volunteers and other well-intentioned Westerners have been coaxing third-worlders to step away from their village cultures, the Ubuntu movement has been urging them to deepen their village identities. Ubuntu is a passionate, charismatic philosophy of survival that is more ambitious than the West can know. Its dream is to become a missionary of tribal collaborative virtues to a world it deems pagan in its individualistic impulses.

And as we spin the globe and put our fingers down almost randomly in other cultures, we see that local definitions of how people connect with one another dictate how they compete as well.

Caution: the random skip around the world that follows is not a statement of conditions ruling the behavior for all persons from these cultures. All cultures are diverse and contain countless internal contradictions and crosscurrents.

In the United States, for instance, the notion exists that reservation Indians are unsuited to manufacturing work. This derives from the politically correct notion ("Everyone knows") that Indians are inescapably collaborative in nature and have no knack for competitive industry. "Factories are not the answer," insists Nancy Jemmison, a Bureau of Indian Affairs planner insists.

But the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians, perhaps not knowing better, are successfully making money and reducing reservation employment to zero by making car speakers, greeting cards, electronic harnesses and plastic injection items.

Nevertheless, there is still some truth to these generalizations about competitive cultures, provided to us by people who have lived in and observed them firsthand:

• Belgium. Home of the European Union, bureaucratic Belgium may be the world's greatest believer in systems as community. As in Magritte's faceless paintings, Belgians eschew flashy individualism in favor of a centered, orderly system in which everyone gets his due. As nations go, Belgium gets less respect than most, as in this caustic description:

• Brazil. Spain and Portugal did not want to compete against one another for the New World they each laid claim to. As Christian nations, they simply divided the hemisphere into two halves along a longitudinal line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese navigator Pedro A. Cabral landed in Brazil in 1500. A strange gesture of civilization: the Portuguese dif not feel they could enslave the unorganized Indian tribes of the region -- they saw their task as converting them, instead -- so they brought slaves from Africa. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to forswear slavery, a legacy that haunts them to this day. Instability, illegitimacy, and plunder of the country's natural resources undermined the country for decades. On the bright side, the country has preserved a rich diversity (170 languages), and a willingness to form joint ventures with countries such as the U.S., Chile, Germany and Japan. The country has a transcompetitive insight that may help halt the destruction of the Amazonian forests. Observers of the rainforest agriculture projects over the past 30 years saw that the primary cause of the forest's destruction was not greed but failure. It has been the unsuccessful farmers who keep moving deeper into the forest, as their ranches go bust. Successful farmers also increase deforestation, but only where they already are. The exchange-encircle-exact formula may be put to work saving the rainforest, if word can be spread in time that the "sure thing" of forest colonization is not sure at all.
• France. France and the U.S. have an antipodal relationship with oner another; they each work hard to be the opposite of the other. Where Americans are adolescent and impulsive, the French are reflective and careful. Where Americans throw themselves into the fight and start swinging confident of eventual victory, the French recuse themselves to a zone of mind and temperament that defines victory on its own terms. The phrase savoir vivre sums up the French attitude toward competing: he who lives best is the only real victor. Early retirement to the country, which is suspect in the U.S., is an accepted goal in France. Their contempt for a civilization which calls gulping a sandwich from a bag while driving a car "dining" is total.
• Unlike The U.S., France seems able to endure high unemployment and endless strikes provided a clear and worthwhile long-term goal is in sight. France is averse to American-style competition much. In its own view, it does not like an unfair fight, which is how it regards the onslaught of American music and films in French markets. But while it disdains the American orientation to efficiency and mass production in matters of food and entertainment, it has adopted that approach in the education of its people. French public school education, which stipulates that every class teach the same curriculum and that students be categorized early and permanently for eventual specialization, is an example of one country doing with its children what the country it despises does with its French fries.
• Germany. Germany, not Japan, is the true home of cross-functional collaboration. Foremen in German factories in the 1920s mastered the jobs of those working under them, so that they could step in at a moment's notice and fill in. In many ways the German workplace is regulated by a sense of flexibility and trust. Blue-collar workers can vault to the white-collar ranks by taking company-paid instructions in engineering, something that could never happen in neighboring France or Italy. Francis Fukuyama calls this element of trust social capital, and it is part of the orderly genius of the German people:

• But Germany is a nation of many tribes. Historically, it has always felt tensions between its western half and its eastern half. Its democratic and industrial traditions have always looked west, but its darker political moments have looked to the east. It is interesting that the largest institution in the nation over the past century has been Germany's own version of keiretsu, the Deutsche Bank, unique among central banks in the degree to which it has interwoven itself into the operational existence of the country's industrial base. But the enormous ($500 billion in assets) institution has proved itself extraordinarily deft in its 125 years of existence. It could be unpopular with the left (Bertolt Brecht: "What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?") and with the right (Hitler used the finance capital polices of the Deutsche Bank to vilify the Jews as responsible for the Depression). Throughout it has remained a symbol of German unity in work and international competition.
• India. Americans regard India as noncompetitive, citing the restrictions of the caste system, and the historic unwillingness of Indians to take the advice of the U.S. on matters such as agriculture and birth control. But this view overlooks India's ability to adapt to changing, often challenging circumstances. When India achieved nationhood in 1947, it moved to reestablish Indian tradition uprooted during its colonial period. This meant a hostility to foreign business (at one point they threw out almost every multinational corporation) and a reliance on the ancient disciple of central management. Government figures decided who would be in business, and set quotas for production for these companies. In such an environment, large-scale entrepreneurism withered, and parties pursued deliberately obtuse industrial policies like "computer chips, not potato chips" -- never mind if people liked potato chips. Only in recent years has it dawned on people that the government is not good at running very much, and a more modern (though still not western) spirit of competitiveness is growing in the country. Large companies are again investing in India, and people are once again unhappy with their foreign-ness. Throughout all these upheavals, however, one thing has remained constant -- the strong Indian preference for family-run business that take care of their own. When Indians compete successfully, it is usually within this familial configuration.
• Indonesia. It is interesting, after reading about the anti-competitive prejudices of modern day Holland, to see how competition has fared in a former Dutch colony. The Dutch record in the East Indies is one of astonishing incompetence. The Dutch East India Company held onto posts that operated at a loss for as long as 30 years in a row. They only really turned a profit during a few seriously exploitative eras, like the 1860s. It was a 200-year con game that didn't fold up until Napoleon moved in 1800. Since becoming independent in 1945, Indonesia has mostly carried on the tradition of bungling, squandering its many powerful competitive advantages: an educated populace, a great work ethic, and a unparalleled location for global trade. The country's strong central government has helped a business establishment grow, but it has severely hamstrung entrepreneurism and innovation with a raft of protectionist and bureaucratic regulations. So long as business is enjoined from competing with one another, it will be unable to compete, and Indonesia, for all its resources, will lag behind Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
• Japan. Japan is a paradox. On the one hand it is a fiercely competitive culture, whose people work with intense commitment to achieve huge goals together. On the other it is the most collaborative of all the industrial cultures, with a sense of us versus them that makes them cohesive internally, and spurs them to great achievements globally. They have a great gift for trust. They believe that if you are like them, Japanese, you are almost automatically a person they can work with. Since they are able to do business with large numbers of people, they create large companies of strangers, then proceed to make a huge family of the strangers. The trust network then spills over to other companies and industries and banks, to enormous keiretsu. Because they do not high-five or spike the ball when they win, the Japanese do not get the credit they deserve for their competitive craft from Americans, and this rankles. Many an American has bargained with Japanese counterparts and left a meeting thinking he got the better of them, to learn otherwise upon careful review of terms. A favorite trick is silence. They are culturally accepting of periods of quiet. By contrast, it drives Americans crazy. Many times an American has blurted out a concession just to get the comforting flow of words going again. Another ploy is "by the bye negotiation": just as negotiations are concluding, and you are glancing at your watch and thinking of your departure time, they propose add-on "by the bye" riders to the agreement. In your anxiety, you agree to everything. Only when you are in the air again do you realize you were played like a Stradivarius.
• Korea. Everyone seems to agree that Koreans are different from the other peoples of East Asia: more individualistic, and more inclined to American-style competition. The English have called Koreans the Irish of Asia, suggesting an extroverted and boisterous nature, but one must consider Great Britain's understanding of the Irish. Koreans see themselves as eclectic survivors, which is close to what we are calling transcompetitive -- imitating the West when that works, and holding fast to traditional norms of family and country at other times. Relationships and patriotism are critical to Koreans. Family and hierarchy are not called into question lightly. Koreans are eager to maintain their appropriate rank in the community, based on their age and social position. Their eclecticism even extends to admiring Japanese ways of doing business. The Korean corporate chaebols of Samsung and Hyundai imitate the Japanese keiretsu, even while Korea retains a deep abhorrence of Japanese culture. Even at their most corporate, Koreans retain powerful traits of agrarian life, from a village culture in which people depended on each other in good times and bad. They don't form lines to board buses because they know how to move together without the device of standing in single file. So is it with business. Linked by work and intermarriage, Koreans look out for one another as no other people in the world do.
• Mexico. Mexico has always enjoyed competition, as evidenced by its passion for football at every level, including the company team. But competitiveness in Mexican business is a fairly new skill, and it is developing as you read this in a random and sometimes self-destructive manner. Under autocratic rule from the Aztecs to Cortez to single party rule under the PRI, the country has practiced severe protectionism, which tended to make Mexican companies lazy, indifferent to quality and to customers. NAFTA changed all that. When Wal-Mart came riding into town they blew Mexican stores' minds. Not so much just because of Wal-Mart's size and resources, but because of their concept of the customer, continuous improvement, quality and empowering employees. Immediately after NAFTA Mexico slumped badly -- some say because of crooked politics, others because so many little factories went down the drain leaving tons of unemployed, and thus a grand reduction in purchasing power. But Mexico is bouncing back and with its still unfulfilled potential as an energy-producing nation promises to be a world-class competitor in the near future. The election in July 1997 of a non-PRE mayor of Mexico City betokens a break with the brute political realities of the past, and a determination to be a new Mexico in the new millennium.
• The Netherlands. Of all the cultures of western Europe, Holland may be the one least attracted to American-style competition. One Dutch correspondent told us pointblank that "unadulterated competition goes well beyond good into evil." An American who lived several years in the Netherlands described the difference. In America when a boy comes home from school with a mediocre grade on a paper, his mother asks, "Why did you score so low?" And the boy responds, "Well, it was one of the highest grades in the class." The mother says, "Oh, then it's a good grade." In the Netherlands, the mother answers, "I don't care, I know you can do better than this. Next time, you start researching your work earlier." In the American case, being better than your peers is the important thing; in the Dutch case, it's doing things as well as you are able. Despite this anti-competitive flavor, it should be noted that Royal Dutch Petroleum is still ranked by Forbes as the single most powerful corporation on earth.
• Nigeria. Africans generally have a powerful sense of community. In most African societies it is unacceptable to enrich oneself at the expense of others. In order of importance is the family, one's elders, the community at large, and then and only then, one's personal success. In the eyes of most Africans, the American competitive system is hopelessly flawed. Nigerians are proud people who see themselves as the marvels of Africa, entrepreneurial and adaptive. But they also see themselves as handicapped by anti-third-world stereotypes of corruption. Fraud and corruption are frowned on in Nigeria. The sense of community is so strong, it will not stand for unfair competition. When billionaire Chief Mashood Abiola appeared to win election to the presidency in 1993, Nigerians saw through the machinations, and threw him in jail. Of course, to the outside world, it looked like a coup d'etat by a group of unelected thugs. Amnesty International has condemned the new government's repressive tactics. But from appearances, the coup is more popular in Nigeria today than the election ever was. In any event, how many billionaires are in jail in the U.S.?
• Russia. There is no nation as troubled about its own competitive culture as Russia, and when a nation straddles eleven time zones, its troubles are important. For seventy years the people of the Soviet Union had drummed into them the collaborative imperative that group success outweighed individual success. Even when they knew that utopian "truth" to be illusory, they had no ethic to replace it with. With the fall of the USSR, Russians are now being told the opposite ethic is the true one, that societies are built by individual success, and that their fate hinges on the deployment of a "market economy." Meanwhile, the West, especially America, is impatient for Russians to develop their own version of "the American dream." What Russians dream of is understanding what is happening to them: An analysis of the emergence of the market economy in Russia is that it is not a "goal" to the Russian people as we perceive goals. THE CHANGE TO A MARKET ECONOMY CANNOT BE A GOAL FOR 150 MILLION PEOPLE. [It] ... rather, is a strategy that is supposed to lead or bring the Russian people to a conclusion, whereby it will be possible to realize the dream. The Russian people want to know where they are going -- they are less concerned about the method of getting to their destination.
  • The identity crisis engulfing Russia is analogous to the radioactive release at Chernobyl, invisible but deadly nonetheless. In part because of this crisis, Russia is passing through a period of unparalleled grief in a long and grievous history. The uncertainty is sapping people's ability to live. Mortality due to illness is five times the world average there. Violent crime is 100 times higher than during the days of the Soviet Union. In this slippery climate, businesses and other organizations are struggling to get a grip. It is a country of many problems, few of which can be solved until the people achieve a consensus on who and what they are.
  • Scandinavia. Norway and Sweden have a long and mostly genteel history of collaboration. Their politics, even when recoiling from socialism, retain a pronounced flavor of connectedness. Leading the way worldwide in teaming, AM Volvo of Sweden is the world's sole worker-owned automobile corporation. But no one expects Volvo ever to become a world-beater, giving Toyota or Ford a run for their money. In the immense company of car-makers, Volvo's attention to safety and utility make it a mini-monopoly. Josh Hammond, author of The Stuff Americans Are Made Of, argues that Norwegians are less collaborative than Swedes because the more rugged topography keeps people from coming together. But there is also a tradition called "the Jante Law" that proclaims that one should not believe one is better than anyone else. Showing off or flaunting one's success, staples of American behavior, are considered poor taste in Scandinavia. Horatio Alger's plucky heroes, who rise from poverty to head successful companies, so admirable to Americans, would strike many Norwegians as morally repulsive. In Sweden, kids aren't graded in school till the eighth or ninth grades. The reason: comparing kids is seen as overly competitive, and destructive to the children's prospects.
  • South Africa. South Africa these days combines a potent mix of competitive and collaborative impulses. The first settlers from Dutch, French and British descent competed with each other and their emphasis was on group winning. Group competition reached its apex with British Imperialism, and it was brutal group competition. The Anglo Boer War, with its "scourged earth" policy, was by many measures the most destructive war the world has ever seen, leaving the country in total ruin. It saw the first use ever of concentration camps. This was followed by the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, resulting in apartheid, which excluded the black population until 1992, when Nelson Mandela was freed. In 1996 the Truth and Reconciliation Board was set up last year to conduct hearings on apartheid atrocities. Hearings revealed many horror stories of the habits of South Africa's "winners."
  • The new constitution of South Africa is sensitive to the impact of group competition, therefore individual rights and community needs, empowerment and sustainability are entrenched. White and black "peace vigilantes" have joined together to prevent the sickness from taking root again. They have "outed" a ruthless soccer coach, Andre Markgraaff, by taping and playing racist remarks he made, and are planning to dethrone an even more ruthless sports figure, Louis Luyt. Likewise, the public is overruling the government by cracking down on street crime. A brave vigilante is more likely to catch the headlines than the gold magnate whose quarterly results put the glitter back in gold. In the new South Africa, say our friends there, the real winner is the person who protects the community rather than filling his own pocket.
  • Switzerland. Neutrality in time of war may seem transcompetitive. It's rational, it's opportunistic, and it's safe. Sweden's Volvo, for instance, thrived during World War II, making tractor engines instead of taking sides. Coca-Cola, too global to be "political," served up sparkling beverages to the Nazis even during the darkest days of the war. But seemingly neutral deeds can come back to haunt one. Switzerland has long been noted for its orderliness, confidentiality, and stiff community-mindedness, including universal military service and gun ownership. But the collaborative spirit seems to come to an abrupt halt at the borders. The country did well during the war, lending money to both sides and accepting funds transfers from Nazis and then denying for 50 years that the money $41 million) belonged to 1,800 murdered Jews. "I am somewhat ashamed," said Swiss Bankers' Association chairman Georg Krayer. "I have not found a figleaf big enough to cover up the negligence of my banking colleagues in the period after the Second World War."
  • Switzerland has taken many hits in recent years for collaborating with Nazi Germany, Ferdinand Marcos, and other worthies. For years Nestlé SA fought world opinion on the topic of marketing infant formula supplement in third world countries -- poor mothers were watering down the formula to cut costs. The Jewish accounts scandal might have dealt the country's banking industry's image a crippling blow, had it not been revealed the same week that Israeli banks, too, diverted the money of Jews to their own investments.
  • Taiwan. Competition in Taiwan is circumscribed by the Confucian value of reverence for the past. Competition is not worth any action that will bring dishonor onto a family. Do what you want, be as successful as you please -- but do not darken the door to your ancestors' house. A "rat race" clearly exists in the country, where work brings material reward which requires more work, but people are alert to the emptiness of this cycle. In their view, Americans have so little regard for the past that they are inevitably an insubstantial people.
  • United Kingdom. The UK is a muddle of conflicted feelings about competition and collaboration. Despite its professed egalitarian values, classism remains embedded in the civil consciousness, and the bitter nemesis relationships that class entails. The 1997 Mark Herman film Brassed Off painted a vivid picture of the entrenched irrationality of worker/management relationships in an embattled Yorkshire coal town. So bitter and so deep was the feeling of to-the-death competition between Labor and Tory that each was perfectly happy to die to cause the other side grief. On the other hand, the movie was about a colliery brass band that pulled together despite severe hardships to win the national band competition at the Albert Hall. Both strains -- rigid class-bound competition and dutiful "Englishman" collaboration -- run deep through the British personality. Margaret Thatcher despaired because British business people were happy to retire after making their first million and live a non-business. She wished more Britishers had the competitive spunk and stamina of their American counterparts. But there is no denying the British ability to form successful teams despite these sharp divisions. Our team consulting in England suggests to us that workers there are not as naturally sullen about teaming as Americans. We attribute this to a greater acceptance of rules and roles in the UK -- acquiescing to the way things are. Where the American cries out, "Don't fence me in" to teams, the British worker sighs and gets on with it. In a world of fractiousness and divisions, there is still something to be said for a stiff upper lip.
  • USA. While it sets the modern standard for individual competitiveness and lacks many common features of a collaborative culture, the United States remains a leader in collaborative business strategies. The learning organization, empowerment, participative management, and "Theory Y" are all American ideas, and they are implemented more in America than in any other country. Total quality management (TQM) is a curious amalgam of American (William Edwards Deming) and Japanese (Kaoru Ishikawa) strains. Despite the country's often impetuous footprint abroad, it is still communitarian enough to invent the world's first and most stable republic, and build a common infrastructure that is the envy of the collaborative world. While the record on racial tolerance is far from perfect, the U.S. has "expanded the circle" to bring outside groups in more than any other nation in history.

The great world example of transcompetitive dynamism isn't happening in Europe, or America, or Japan. It's happening along the east coast of China, which is undergoing fantastic change in the aftermath of China's reabsorption of Hong Kong in the summer of 1997.

The West characteristically did not know how to understand the handover of the British colony to China. Americans focused on issues of individual liberty. The British focused on the continuing diminution of empire and influence. Japan focused on the alarming potential of a China led by a community that knows how to compete in a way that not even Japan can match.

Where Japan enjoys a naturally collaborative culture, China occupies the neutral zone on the scale of connectedness, in the space between competition and collaboration reserved for family feeling. Though the Chinese are cheerfully international in their outlook, brilliant traders and savvy managers, they are not as given to trusting one another, except within families. As a result, the companies of Hong Kong have generally not been very big, and they tend to be very closely held, because they are based on the extended family of the owners. People inside the family can be trusted, and the obligation to hire and help cousins one may not ever have met is very high; people outside the family (contractors, customers, and unknown stockholders) are not to be trusted. This is why Hong Kong, successful as it is, can't boast big native keiretsus and zaibatsus like the Japanese. The biggest companies in the city are foreign-owned.

The question everyone is asking, of course, is: What will happen now that capitalist Hong Kong is fully Chinese again.

Our sense is that Hong Kong has always been Chinese, and that China has been striving in its own way for many years to become more like Hong Kong. The province of Guangzhou surrounding Hong Kong -- and until recently separated by barbed wire -- is an example of civic mimicry, the walled creature trying desperately to ape the behavior of the free creature on the other side of the wall. The city of Shenzhen, directly across from the older city, has obvious aspirations to one day blend into Hong Kong and become its twin city.

Though China was a Communist country for fifty years, Communism took root less well there than in the Soviet Union. The family is still the dominant power in Han China, and like a family, China itself is happy its brilliant prodigal child back.

The 1989 massacre Tienanmen Square was a nightmare in part because it ran counter to Chinese family values, which tolerates dissent within the family. It was perhaps the low point of the last 1,000 years of Chinese history. But it was also a learning experience.

There was a tantalizing report, not yet officially confirmed, that Deng showed deep remorse about the Tienanmen crackdown on his deathbed, calling it the regret of a lifetime. If that view wins wide support, China is in for some changes. Any reevaluation of Tienanmen that acknowledges the patriotism and generally good behavior of the students will shake up China's view of herself and how she is seen by the outside world. Even so, human rights won't just disappear by themselves, and democracy won't sprout up overnight. Just as important as the truth about Tienanmen is the right to disagree with the party line. As long as the Communist Party has monopoly on political ideology and leadership, it can revise history every week and it won't bring freedom.

China has felt the power of exchange-encircle-exact, and will think three times before raising its hand against its own again. But trust, of the kind so common in Japan, will take root slowly:

In the eyes of many Chinese, the communists lost the moral right to govern after the Tienanmen Massacre, and are tolerated only as long as the economy continues to perform so well. However, the Chinese leaders likewise do not trust their citizens to wield political power: the memory of the Cultural Revolution is particularly fresh in the minds of those who, like Deng Xiaoping, suffered horribly at the hands of the young Red Brigade.

While massacres may have worked so far in quelling political dissent, there is serious doubt of their future efficacy. For one, the whole world has China under a media microscope, particularly with regard to Hong Kong. In this decade, satellite TV and the Internet have opened information floodgates. If the families of the troops and politicians are able to see their youngsters being killed live on BBC and CNN, such violence may be impossible to conduct for any length of time.

Despite all the troubles, the outlook for China is bright. Mao's sick supercollaborative regime is gone, and Jiang Zemin, China's leader after the death of Deng Xiaoping, has it in his power to be China's Gorbachev and preside over the dismantling of the Brute state that remains in place, and the creation of a transcompetitive nation that will write a surprising new page about human progress, combining the best of the two worlds it knows. What China brings to the table, no other country can: the knowledge gained over many centuries of frustration and denial, that long-term survival is the sweetest success of all.

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