Fugues and Variations
Other factors in competitive style
Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998
(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
When we talk about competition in the workplace, it is useful to remember what competition means biologically: winning (securing survival) by depriving others of scarce resources. In nature these resources are food, status, territory, and reproductive rights. In business they are still food, status, territory, and reproductive rights, with the added factor of economic leverage -- competing for wealth.
Of these four, food is the simplest to understand and the most easily explained. A subsistence farmer "competes" against the weather and insects. He competes against other farmers for prime real estate. He competes against the clock to bring in his crops at the most advantageous moment. And he competes against a finite economy -- none of the things he need to survive are in infinite supply. Scarcity is thus the primary driver for competition. When there is plenty for all, no one needs to compete.
A Word about Scarcity
Scarcity is a word that keeps coming up, like a bad penny, in nature studies and in human competition. What's scarce in the natural world could be eucalyptus leaves or wallowing water or grazing space or meat on the hoof. In the human world, it can be money, time, attention or opportunity. Consumers are always being reminded that nothing is limitless:
Many things are truly scarce. There is not enough money in the world to make everyone a billionaire. There is not enough land to give everyone 100 acres. Companies can not hire every applicant that comes in the door.
On the other hand, we all have a tendency to create mental scarcities where none really exists.
One of the transcompetitive habits is to know what you are competing for, and to establish whether its scarcity is real or imaginary. Too often, what is scarce is not money, or physical resources, but information and the goodwill to share it.
Competing for bandwidth
Most wild creatures overcome scarcity problems via nichemanship: customizing their habits so that they aren't competing against the whole wild world for food, territory, and reproductive rights. Ecological niches are not simply places; they are jobs, or more precisely, lifestyles that get you what you need.
The story of the transcompetitive age is of businesses avoiding the old head-to-head confrontations where competition is bruising and profits are accordingly narrow. Instead, they are finding niches for themselves, places where they can be unique and charge the kinds of prices that unique providers customarily obtain.
What is surprising is how many businesses, and people in business, ignore this fact known to every other creature. The inclination to be plain vanilla may arise from management theory, which holds that the skills of management are universally applicable to any industry. This may help explain why big companies line up to recruit Harvard and Stanford MBAs. It also explains why big companies have a harder time changing than their smaller counterparts: they define themselves as diversity-adverse, in the face of the clear dangers of being a me-too organization.
Our sense is that plain-vanilla companies feel safer that way, disguised as one among many, like wildebeests on the veldt. But "hiding in plain sight" provides a false sense of comfort and camouflage. It merely stakes out a position of mediocrity.
Whereas, diversity is setting us free. Thanks to post-assembly line manufacturing and advances in global information technology, a vast array of groups are establishing viable niches for themselves. The Usenet on the Internet boasts over 20,000 special interest newsgroups. Many hundreds of thousands of businesses are creating websites for themselves. Many never win an audience, and die in a fortnight. Others will attract markets and customers unthinkable to them a few short years ago, extending their organizational life by many years.
Many of us pass through this drumming of differentiation unaware of the activity. Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, has noticed:
On the radio it is possible to turn the dial and find stations dedicated to certain types of music, from classical and contemporary to bluegrass, zydeco, salsa, tejana, tropical, bomba and bangra. To a thousand different strains, the tastes of individuals are emerging as a market force to be dealt with.
Nichemanship is not the only alternative to head-to-head competition. Other outcomes include:
We confuse so many concepts relating to competition.
Competitiveness is not the same as bigness. Though many of us are leery of sheer physical power, a person or organization is not "competitive" merely by being big. In fact, bigness may connote power, but seldom long-term survival. Bigness implies certain competitive advantages -- financial and political resources. But it just as surely implies inflexibility and slowness, which are clearly noncompetitive traits.
Competitiveness is no more the same as badness, as collaboration is the same as virtue. We get carried away with our noble expressions of group endeavor: "We came in peace for all mankind." That's what the Apollo message left on the moon says. But the United States had many reasons for going into space.
There is a famous anecdote about three stonecutters. Asked what they were doing, the first replied, "finishing up my shift." The second answered, "carrying this hod of bricks to the fourth level." The third, with the "right," virtuous, visionary, collaborative answer, said, "I'm building a cathedral to the glory of God." Nice story, but all three workmen were right.
The truth is that you can be competitive and good or collaborative and bad. Hitler's SS were wonderfully collaborative in the sense of working well together, rounding up people who were outside their collaborative circle and killing them. Working together by itself has no moral weight. Competitive and collaborative traits are found equally in both saints and sinners.
Competitive is not the same as intelligent. We all think that people who win at whatever they do have a special spark, and chances are that that spark is intelligence: survival of the intellectually fittest. But there is very little correlation between high intelligence and high achievement, versus average intelligence and high achievement. To the contrary, the world is full of great minds that never blossom, never fulfill their promise, overachievers who perform stratospherically beyond expectations: 19th round draft picks who become star athletes, C students who go on to stellar careers. Call the spark that drives them to achieve intelligence, if you must, but it isn't the kind of intelligence that IQ tests attempt to surface.
Finally, and most important, competitiveness is not the same as aggressiveness. The tendency to equate competitiveness with aggressiveness is great, because supercompetitive people are usually aggressive as well. But there's a difference between wanting to win and wanting to maim.
Aggression is a tool of competition, but not an indispensable one. It is really just one of the two ways people and other creatures act when confronted with the fight-or-flight message their brains send out when there is trouble. In nature, you see it mainly between males demonstrating how macho they are: the horn fighting of sheep, deer, and antelope; the spectacular displays and fighting among grouse, and other birds; the heavyweight battles of elephant seals for the possession of harems.
In business, aggression is less violent, but geared toward the same objectives: chasing rivals off, staking claim to the best turf, the highest roosting place, the juiciest territory:
Most aggressiveness is just noise -- activity that accompanies another behavior. It is the other behavior -- stealing a carcass, impressing a peer, doubling market share -- that is really important. The aggressiveness is window dressing, to underscore a point. Consider the machismo of males during rutting season, and especially the sartorial splendor of certain male birds parading on their communal display grounds. it's for show.
But then you have actual aggression, which is something else -- the urge to win/kill. Aggression is when you are no longer putting on a show. Now you mean it, and someone is going to get hurt. Knowing the difference in your organization is vital: it allows you to distinguish between people beating their own chests, which is merely annoying, and people beating other people's chests, which is alarming.
Aggression is a response to a threat, as identified by the amygdala. The less stimulus you need, or the more violently you react to it, the more aggressive you are. And the more aggressive you are by nature, the harder it will be to graft transcompetitive behaviors onto your everyday set.
Here is the nub of it all. People with higher aggression thresholds will be able to adapt to transcompetitive behavior sets without much difficulty. People with low thresholds must work at it the way alcoholics fight off temptation.
It is said that bullies are their own biggest victims, because bullying is one of the hardest behaviors to subdue. Why is it so difficult? Because of the fear it instills in others. Bullies who have not raised a hand to anyone in years must climb a wall of distrust created the last time they swung in anger.
The burden of those years usually prevents them from sharing in the collaborative goodies of civilization.
Competing for status
Status in people is the same thing as dominance in animals. We all have ambivalent feelings about the word status. We dislike dominance even more.
Here are forms of dominance that are not welcome:
Here are some of the ways these forms of dominance pop up in the workplace:
Dominance is not a one-way street. Individuals who accept the dominance of others also receive their protection. Which beats being driven out into the desert to die, hands down. People who butt heads with the dominant and lose are not killed -- they are often encouraged to rest up, heal their wounds, and try again when the mood hits them. This is social liquidity: challenges are welcome, up to a point. Sometimes the passage of time by itself will improve the status of a challenger: dominants do die, eventually, or they get hired away by organizations turned on by their competitive fire.
Edward Wilson notes that, in nature, the more cohesive and durable the social group, the more complex and "liberal" the dominance order. Antelopes and sheep are all based on size and age; with Old World monkeys, it stems from the mother's rank, to membership in coalitions, and to dumb luck: in an established family beats being a still-damp immigrant. A young steer lucky enough to catch an old bull off guard has refreshed many a corporate hierarchy.
The best part of dominance is that people suck up to you. In the goose flock the lesser geese groom the leader. In the corporate flock the dominant are complimented, patted on the back, and accorded special privileges. True leaders will run like hell from this peel-me-a-grape treatment, as it is divisive and decadent. The merely dominant will luxuriate in it.
We don't like the brutal kind of dominance, but we easily make room for the interactive kind. Because it serves an important role in nature of resolving disputes: whoever "dominates" gets to decide who stays and who goes. Sophisticated dominance systems are valuable for establishing long-term security, succession, and peace.
Our objective, then, is not to make dominance illegal but to groove it into ways that extend group life, and make the team transcompetitive.
Because it is premised on a single strong leader, dominance guarantees peace in the near term. And the near term is important. But when a single person dominates this way, the group must be rational enough to remember that the long term is also important. When the dominant leader starts chasing away people and ideas that may be crucial to long-term survival, it's time for the dominated to rise up and overthrow the brute.
Competing for LOVE
Gender and competition are like liquor and drugs: dangerous by themselves, lethal in combination with one another.
As you examine your organization's competitive culture, do not overlook the fact that a lot of competitive behavior is males showing off to females, and vice versa. Men ask to be on certain teams to be close to attractive women; women do likewise to be near attractive men. Executives set out to save their companies, and get confused along the way when they discover that power is an aphrodisiac. Women executives become cold and hard because they know if they show their sexuality for even a second they become vulnerable and lose power.
Consider this analogy:
men : goal-driven :: women : bitches
Isn't that about how we think?
Many books have been written just about the way males and females compete. How do you ignore the apparent male advantages? They are bigger and stronger, they are natural hunters, focused on a single outcome to the exclusion of all others, they know how to fight, and they seem to relish the opportunity. They are socially free to roam and improve their competitive skills, while females are strongly encouraged to stay home, away from the competitive realm, have babies, are natural multitaskers and thus less "focused," and exist in a collaborative toyhouse realm designed just for females. Pushed to extremes, men become predators, competing to the point of death; women become martyrs, collaborating with no thought of themselves.
So opposite are males and females encouraged to behave that it is possible to characterize the competitive end of the connectedness scale as male, and the collaborative end as female. Tribes send boys on walkabouts to learn the skills of contending with the world; we send girls to finishing school to polish their "female" skills of nurturance, hospitality, and accommodation.
One of the sickest aspects of male competitiveness is that it undermines the ability men have to be friends to one another. Not "sitting around on Sundays watching football and chasing down some brews" friends, but friends who can open up with one another and admit to weakness. `
Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says that our society trains men to be skilled at competition and inept at relationships, and trains women to be the opposite, collaborators skilled at knitting relationships together. In such a pairing, women are the ultimate "winners," because as theologian and philosopher Martin Buber said in I-Thou, relationships are where God is to be found. Buber never mentioned football.
Despite stereotyping, women are as likely to have competitive personalities as men, and vice versa. It is only in the supercompetitive and supercollaborative dimensions that gender starts to make a difference. And men who vary from the party line may suffer as much from the war of gender expectations as women. We may not call men "bitch" but we have names just as bad: "wimp," "whiner," "doormat."
Remember the Barbie Doll math controversy of a few years ago? Mattel was selling Barbie Dolls with pull-strings, one of whose messages was: "Oh, math is so hard!"
The spit hit the fan when feminists got wind of the message, Bad enough to be insipid, but to embed an already hopelessly sexist toy with the suggestion that girls should take a back seat to boys in the manly art of arithmetic -- it was really too much. A protest ensued, Mattel yanked the product and reconfigured it, and the human race limped on, a scintilla safer from the killer instinct of its own males.
Are males better at math than girls? Let's think about that. It might be true. It is one of the most male-dominated disciplines in academia. On the other hand, it is also one of the most underpaid. People good at math generally do not rise to positions of leadership. They wind up as accountants, actuaries, financial officers and researchers.
Math is not the problem. Competitiveness is. Are males more competitive than females? No, but they are often more supercompetitive, more aggressive. Boys get called on more in school because they insist on being called on. This male insistence puts girls at a disadvantage, especially in male-dominated spheres.
Recent research seems to indicate that by separating girls and boys at their most vulnerable social age (10-13), girls accelerate at the same pace as boys. They learn from one another, and collaborate among themselves to achieve the same interest and achievement in math.
Curiously enough, so do the boys. Since they are not competing for the attention of the opposite sex, they are free to concentrate on their school work better.
In the workplace, this me-first demand of males may look enthusiastic and vital at first, but it exerts a long-term tension that forces many females to despair of getting a word in edgewise, much less a promotion, or equal consideration.
The general rule is that American males are simply trained to win. The object, a boy soon gathers, is not to be liked but to be envied, not to reflect but to act, not to be part of a group but to distinguish himself from the others in that group. Being number one is an imperative for boys, so a good deal is invested in whether one makes it.
Take a second and rephrase that paragraph, saying the exact opposite about females. These are the female's demesnes: being liked, reflectiveness, blending in with the group, caring for others, not beating them. Our entire system expects females to be good collaborative people, and males to be competitive SOBs. It doesn't matter if males and females are "naturally" this way; many are not, and no one has the right to force these identities on everyone. The only policeman is nature, and nature is enjoying a doughnut.
Eliminating bias against women in your organization is beyond the scope of this book. All we will do is point to the benefits of eliminating this kind of competition and replacing it with true competitive free-for-all, in which people collide, but gender is neither a handicap nor an advantage. Call this utopian state -- oh -- free enterprise.
And here's a refreshing note. Recall the infamous case of the Vietnamese shoe company that made shoes for Nike, and whose floor manager forced the women who refused to wear the right shoes to run until they collapsed? It was not a story of mean male bosses tyrannizing poor female employees. The manager in question was a woman.
Until conditions are fair to both genders everywhere, that factoid constitutes progress.
Competing for Space
Competition is related to population. When crowded, cats go cuckoo. Play grinds to a halt. Hierarchy breaks down, and eventually a despot emerges. The despot cat is every group's worst nightmare, a leader with a license to torment everyone in the group. The crowded cats grow increasingly neurotic, obsessing about maintaining what is theirs at all costs. "Pariahs" are designated, and the community turns into a spiteful mob, attacking the pariahs, apparently in the hope that the sacrifice will improve their condition. In the end the cats achieve a kind of sick stasis, constantly hissing, growling, and even fighting.
Rats don't do well, either. In one famous experiment, crowded Norway rats became hypersexual, trying to have sex with everything and everyone they came in contact with. Some animals became exclusively homosexuality. Some managed to keep up appearances, building nests as if everything is still OK -- but the nests were distorted and nonfunctional. Infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent. Others reached the end of the connectedness scale and indulged in cannibalism.
Edward Wilson again:
The lesson for man is that personal happiness has very little to do with this. It is possible to be unhappy and very adaptive. If we wish to reduce our own aggressive behavior, and lower our catecholamine and corticosteroid titers to levels that make us all happier, we should design our population density and social systems in such a way as to make aggression inappropriate in most conceivable circumstances and, hence, less adaptive.
When Harvey was a bright-eyed lad in graduate school, he conducted his own crowding experiment, with gerbils. He created a virtual apartment building of the animals, and then played with the population level. He provided the same proportionate amount of food and water as the population increased, so behavior changes wouldn't be about scarcity, just closeness. His expectation was that the animals would become more aggressive as their numbers increased.
And that was true, up to a point. As comfort space between the animals diminished, they became visibly more snappish with one another. At a certain point, the connectedness scale disintegrated, and it became every animal fighting for himself. Males, females, young, old -- all were competing for the sanity of elbow room. He had created a supercompetitive world.
But when he kept adding gerbils, he observed the snapback. When they were all literally sitting in one another's laps, they reverted to docile, nonaggressive behavior. Males stopped their characteristic fighting. Motion subsided. Conditions had become so intolerable, they reverted to supercollaboration, grooming one another incessantly. Compare that scenario with our description (page X) of a world driven beyond supercompetition.
We have all worked in different environments, and we are aware of our own responses. An empty room, in which one can hear a pin drop, is a hard place for brutes and tricksters and pawns -- for most people -- to work. But fill the room up, with different kinds of people, and the dynamics change radically.
Unlike the termite colony, in which every individual contributed to a seamless whole, people jostle and bump into one another, both physically and emotionally. A team of five or six or seven people who have had time to get to know one another and have worked out most of the issues that set one against another, have a chance to reach a very high level of functionality. The presence of one another nearby is compelling and exciting.
But flood the office with strangers -- people making tours, solicitors passing from desk to desk, too many documents dropped in too few in-boxes, too many lights blinking on the phone banks, too many meetings, with too many people -- and the "sweet spot" of transcompetitive give-and-take implodes. people curl up into their cubicles and hope the noise dies down, and the extra people go away. The original team, surrounded by the extraneous players, look at one another with sorrow and longing. Functionality has fled. The team is like a frightened family, huddling in a shelter, waiting for a storm to blow over.
competing FOR TIME
Though we all follow our preferred competitive styles (brute, trickster, etc.), our styles are not set in concrete. In life, there is a typical curve, a competitive life cycle, that we all follow.
We are born struggling to survive, wailing, bleating, and thrashing for the nipple. As we grow, we discover the pleasure of performance. Performance is the sweetest form of competition, because we are not competing against others, just ourselves, and previous performance. It is what drives a toddler to take the second step after the first step -- competing against one's best previous work.
Competition at its most poignant is when we do our best to show what is in us. We see it in a child's proud schoolwork, in the earnest efforts of a worker outpacing others in hopes of being discovered. Competition is like an exultant shout to the world: see me, know me. It is 100 percent functional, and oftentimes it is the glory of our species.
Much dysfunctional competition occurs when the desire to be known and evaluated is in some way frustrated: the death of or abandonment by a parent are common experiences of supercompeters. Unable to achieve the normal level of validation, they push themselves to extraordinary lengths to achieve approval mere spectators are unable to bestow.
In the healthy individual, competitiveness decreases with age. As we grow, our interests tend to expand beyond our own survival and success to the happiness and sustainability of those we care about.
Employment in the second decade provides a first taste of collaboration. Marriage, an intensely collaborative contract, happens most often in the third decade of human life.
The fourth decade of our lives, our 30s, finds us intensely collaborative as we raise our families, work with teams, join church and other groups, mingle with our neighbors, become bosses and assume responsibility for other people, other lives.
By the end of life we are teachers, and our purpose in life is to share what we have learned. In all it is a transcompetitive arc, from struggle to survive to survival beyond struggle.
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