Borrowing from Minneapolis to Pay St. Paul
Competition and teams
Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998
(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
While you ponder a switch to transcompetitive habits, and what may demand, think local. If you focus on parts of your culture you can reach out and touch, you will be able to better comprehend your competitive culture and better able to give it a nudge.
In our case, we have a handy local example of how collaboration and competition can be mixed and matched -- the Twin Cities where the two of us live.
They were never supposed to be "twin cities." They were settled seven miles apart in the 1840s for reasons logical to each: Minneapolis had a waterfall that could generate power, grind flour, and saw boards; and Saint Paul, at the juncture of two great rivers, was a natural port. They gradually grew into one metropolis in this century, as people filled in the gaps between the cities. The closeness forced them to acknowledge issues of competition and collaboration more remote locales could ignore. The combination of the two helped create one of the more prosperous and progressive urban areas in North America. Though not the most exciting metropolis, The Twin Cities constitute an urban approximation of the principle of continuous winning.
Here are some of the ways the two cities bang their heads and put them together:
ï COMPETITIVE COLLABORATIVE ð
ï New Business. The two cities compete against each other to bring in new businesses, jobs, and professional sports teams.
ð Defense. Old Fort Snelling, built between the two cities, made the area safe for settling and doing business.
ï Government Money. The two cities have different congressmen, and the fight for spoils -- bridges, highways, block grants -- is often intense.
ð Healthcare. Minnesota helped invent HMOs in the 1920s. In the 1980s the state led in creating a health insurance plan for the poor.
ï Expansion. Since the 1960s, Minneapolis sprinted ahead as a builder. Its downtown is an urban gem, while Saint Paul's languishes.
ð Education. Minneapolis got the liberal arts and medical parts of the University of Minnesota; Saint Paul won the farm campus.
ï Power. Saint Paul is the seat of government, but Minneapolis is clearly the source of more political clout these days.
ð Community. The Scandinavian tradition of sharing has always marked Minnesota politics, from barn raising to food shelves.
Generally speaking, Minnesota has been good enough at competing to keep its people employed without competing so well that it triggers a violent cycle of boom and bust, as occurs in other high-tech economic pockets -- Silicon Valley, Boston, and Puget Sound. Where the region once competed solely on the basis of commodity plenty -- lumber and grain -- in our more shrunken world it maintains economic niche communities in agribusiness and the biomedical products industry. The new plenty, based on trading and inventing, is information-based: because so many companies in these industries are clustered in the same area, there is a lot of expertise being shared from company to company.
Where we're going
In a bit we shall see that there are limits on the region's collaborative goodwill, that its future vitality may depend on its ability to enlarge the circle of the known one more time. Meantime, it is as good an example of a transcompetitive "community of communities" as you'll find.
The Twin Cities never set out to be transcompetitive, of course. And the rivalries of a hundred years ago continue, as the cities vie for bragging rights to scores of issues, from which city has the best ribs to who has the better lifestyles to who has the best parks and architecture, which newspaper arrives at the news scene first, whose high school basketball teams are best, whose citizens pay lower property taxes, and which city has the most cineplexes.
But these are all "competing on quality" issues, a non-cannibalistic competition that challenges but does not destroy. It is a kind of competition that often brings out the best in all sides.
The next few sections will focus on transcompetitive challenges between different levels of entities. As we move from one to the next, they will telescope in dimension, from the very small and local, to the very large and global:
As we step from stone to stone, we will hearken occasionally to the example of the two cities in Minnesota whose fates are forever intertwined.
Comfortable space
Take teams. A Portland, Oregon real estate developer we recently met, believing we were "team freaks," asked if it wasn't true that people need to be on teams, as a fundamental human hunger, and that teams need to be with one another, to "colocate," to share physical space with one another, in order to function. He wanted us to say yes because that would justify him building a 200-office building corporate office building (one for each team), instead of the 125-office building that was probably more appropriate.
We said, well, sort of. Among the ordinary human desires is the desire to socialize and to work together. It strikes most people as an empty experience to do something good and have no one to share it with, or show it to. People not only crave company, but they crave company that is like them. True team members are like family; when teams don't gel, it is often because they cannot approximate this near-family feeling.
We were reminded of this requirement in January 1997, when the space shuttle Atlantis ferried astronaut John Blaha home after 128 days on the Mir space station. Blaha, clearly drained by his four-month journey in space, startled reporters with his admission that he felt "alone and afraid" among his Russian counterparts, who had been together for many months already, and whom he had never met. His complaint sounds unastronautish, and not quite politically correct, but his words came from the heart:
"After I'd been there a month, I was a little bit getting psychologically depressed," the 54-year-old astronaut said.
Blaha said he would have liked private quarters on the station and a fellow American on board to talk with.
NASA has tried to be sensitive to the psychological needs of the astronauts who have stayed on Mir after the first astronaut on Mir, Norman Thagard, complained of "cultural isolation" during his 115-day stay in 1995.
What happened was that the cultural differentness of the Mir cosmonauts and the stress of being in a very strange place, shook Blaha to his foundations. In space you want a team you feel absolutely comfortable with, and he had strangers. At home in the psychological comfort of his Laz-E Boy, Blaha would have been able to reach out to his unknown partners. In the lonely reaches of space, his amygdala decided for him, painting them as strangers and thus vaguely negative. The fact that Russia's and America's hopes for the experiment were sometimes competitive exacerbated Blaha's sense of team unease.
Team unease -- when people are forced to be a team before they really are a team -- is a primary reason teams don't work. And competition can be an enormous hindrance to the formation of team solidarity. Teams that are exposed to high a dose of it, over too long a period, are on the brink of nonexistence even when every member is still showing up for work.
To help an uneasy team become a team at ease with itself, you do not need to impress upon members a vision of beatific brotherhood and universal cooperation. You don't need to convince them they have no "enemies." You only need to inform them that the enemy isn't on their team, or between your team and another, and the advantages to everyone of continuous winning.
Some Party
You may be familiar with the phrase "matched team." That sounds like the kind of team we would like to be on -- a team on which all members share the same interests and behavioral patterns.
The phrase comes from comes from animal husbandry, referring to oxen. Oxen are gelded bulls, and a matched team is a pair or quartet of oxen with the same strength, and who pull at the same rate and in the same direction. With oxen, this matching was very expensive: when one team member died, the other was often slaughtered as well, because it was not possible to train it to work as effectively with another team member.
So much for wanting to be on a matched team.
In certain places in the Twin Cities, along the route of interstate 94, which stretches from Chicago to Seattle, are the visible furrows of the Ox-Cart Trail, which was the superhighway pioneers used to get from the east to the west, and when things went sour, back east again.
The best story we know illustrating the perils of unmatched teams -- the people being pulled by the oxen, not the oxen themselves -- began in the spring of 1856, in similar furrows in lower Illinois. One of the human teams went by the name of Donner.
The Donner party was a caravan of several Illinois teams, families mostly, who attempted to cross the Truckee Route in the American west in the winter of 1846-47. Had they made it intact to California, they would have been among the first dozen groups of Americans to settle there. Instead, their fate is commemorated in a park a few short miles from the casinos of Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
In this park is a set of shacks, hastily erected to ward off nightly 4-foot snowfalls. Here, trapped by snow and cold, their resources and strength depleted, families squabbled, people boiled cowhides to stay alive, and a few resorted to the far points on the connectedness scale: cannibalism.
There was not an experienced trailblazer in the entire group of 90. Instead were several families of farmers, Donners and Reeds and others who saw the move west as a sound economic move but were unprepared for the difficulty of the crossing, the severity of the winter, and the quickness of its onset.
It could be argued that what defeated the Donner Party was not the snows but their own infighting. A frontier guesstimator named Lansford Hastings assured them the Truckee trail could shave 400 miles off their journey. As is the case with many change initiatives, Hastings did not mention the shorter route would be straight uphill. Their party did not arrive at the Utah flats until late August, and nearly died in the six-day push across the salt sand expanse there.
Instead of unifying them, the desert experience splintered them into bitter factions. At one point a fight broke out, and before he knew it, one team leader, James Reed stabbed and killed a man. Reed was banished from the group, and from that point on, desperately needing unity in the face of marauding Indians, bad weather, and treacherous terrain, the two main teams seldom spoke. They were as distant from one another in the wilderness as John Blaha was distant from his Russian colleagues orbiting the earth.
When they finally took camp in what is now known as Donner Pass, they were only three miles, a half-day's trek from safety. As they huddled in their separate shacks, wasting away, they could reflect on the cost of their infighting:
It was not merely the cold, for there was plenty of firewood and, at first, men to cut it; nor was it the hunger and malnutrition, for at first there were a few beeves, oxen, then the remaining few horses, mules, and finally, dogs. Their inability to accept discipline or leadership, the inter-family hatreds that pursued them right down to their deaths, so that there was never any sharing of food or hope or comfort ... these caused their slow destruction; these deprived them of their strongest psychological weapon for survival.
Any one day would have saved them: one of the four spent resting at Fort Bridger, one of the five spent waiting for Reed to return from his trip to overtake Hastings, one of the seven spent pursuing Hastings' trail south and then north again, one of the five in the Truckee meadows, the last day's refusal to push the final three miles behind Stanton; one day that the devastating snowstorms might have held off. Or any of the innumerable days spent in quarreling, refusing to help each other, to share food, water, oxen, friendship, leadership.
Teaming Frenzy
Your organization may not be boiling cowhides yet, but chances are the analogy holds up on these counts:
A sure sign that teams are going to be with us to the end of time was the conversion some years ago of big city newsrooms to teams.
Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows that the spirit of this kind of place is pure individualism and pure competition. Newspapers have always striven, often desperately, to scoop one another. And within newsrooms, reporters have kept secrets from one another, in the style of Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
For the past 25 years, however, newspaper readership has been shrinking, two-edition papers have been consolidating to a single morning edition, and many cities have wound up with virtual monopolies. The Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Tribune merged into one paper, the Star Tribune in the 1970s. Across the river, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and Saint Paul Dispatch, did the same. In each case, the blending of newsrooms and the creation of one big staff at each paper caused great consternation and resistance.
But that was nothing compared to the 1990s and the arrival of teams. Teams has been the biggest of all management fads, adopted by more companies than the sum of companies adopting TQM, reengineering, and the learning organization. Teams, as opposed to the hierarchical boss-worker line of command, soon assumed an air of inevitability. Businesses which had no business turning to teams did, with bizarre results.
The Saint Paul Pioneer Press (to which Mike contributes a weekly column) adopted teams in a pretty conventional way. People were introduced to the idea, taught the new rules of collaboration, and pretty soon everyone forgot about the idea, except that reporters rely on one another more in the editing stages, and editors and writers have worked to achieve a less adversarial, more mentor-student relationship.
Upstream in Minneapolis, the story was very different. A passionate and visionary publisher, Joel Kramer, who believes papers must radically recreate their relationship with a changing readership, has the paper embarked on an irreversible journey into what its own reporters call "The Strangeness."
Beginning last fall, teams of formerly independent reporters and copyeditors and photographers and graphic artists started to work in unfamiliar collaborations. Stories ... no longer fall into predetermined spaces in the paper but rather float through the newsroom in search of a place in tomorrow's edition. A new newsroom leadership exists on paper, but in practice almost nobody tells anybody what to do anymore.
The old understandings -- all the terminologies and work patterns and lines of accountability that traditionally defined the way journalism has been practiced at a daily newspaper -- have disappeared in a bewildering muddle of faddish business jargon and woozy New Age management stratagems. The objective is to make the staff less beholden to a daily routine that has as its focus the production of tomorrow's newspaper -- to open them up to new products, new channels of communication, to the end of their world as they have always known it.
Only two constants have persisted through the tumult. One has been management's continuing inability to explain to the staff and to the outside world what they are trying to accomplish and why -- to demonstrate, in short, a logic lurking in the flux they've created.
The number one rule of teams, as we pointed out in THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK, is that they have a purpose. It is not clear to anyone what the purpose of teaming is at the Star Tribune -- they are doing it because they feel they have to try something to forestall the tough economic times they see coming, as newspapers seem less and less necessary to busy and increasingly illiterate people. Now they are so committed to the change process, there is no turning back. Though their problem is too much teamwork, instead of too little, their situation is not much better tan that of the Donner Party, hunkered in the high Sierra, watching the snow fall around them.
Individual differences
It helps greatly to assess team members to understand their proclivities, to see who are the potential brutes, who are the subtle tricksters, who are content to suffer pawn-bashing and who has emotionally vacated the premises, hermit-style.
Every team is different. You do not know, as you are introduced to the people you will be teaming with, what the individual styles of each member are, or what the group style has been up until that point.
Beyond that, teams become more transcompetitive, more optimal in their behaviors, more conducive to continuous winning, as they choose how they will act, on the basis of meeting actual, identifiable needs, and get away from reflexive actions that repeat a competitive behavior because it is the only one they know.
It is not true that a team must cleanse itself of extreme types to function -- i.e., drive away supercompeters and supercollaborators. It is true that these types may pose a danger to team success if they are unable to graduate from a habitual to a more conscious way of behaving.
Teams and turf wars
Turf wars are wars between teams for the purpose of surviving. These wars can have several causes:
When this happens, both the team and the organization they are part of are sitting in deep snow, that is only getting deeper.
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