The Synedelphia Story
The future of competition
Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998
(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
So. We've been told to bank our competitive fires and alter the wiring of our brains. We have identified our competitive archetypes, and made plans to coax them toward the transcompetitive center. We have mixed and matched our competitive and collaborative options to create a rational new way of doing business. We have exchanged, encircled, and exacted till we were blue.
Have we achieved anything? Can we even hope to?
Writing this book, several people told us, one very emphatic, that it was useless. "People are put on earth to duke it out," a very beefy man at a Rotary lunch said. "Duking it out is the only chance we have."
Others let us know that, if they had the choice, they would gladly opt for a more genteel way of doing business. Competitiveness arises from market forces, they insisted, not from their personalities.
Or, maybe other companies in our industry are predators, but we're not. We're just responding to their aggressive actions. And sometimes those responses are preemptive -- striking them before they strike us.
This is the reasoning of people like Wayne Sanders of Kimberly-Clark, whose quote, "Every morning I look in the mirror and ask how I can beat the hell out of Procter & Gamble," appeared on the cover of Forbes. (Inside, he added, in a whisper: "And I want every one of my employees to do the same.")
Kimberly-Clark was the obvious underdog in the disposable diaper wars against mighty Procter & Gamble. P&G responded to K-C's challenge with everything in its arsenal, from legal challenges to marketing blitzes to price wars, all designed to bury the Wisconsin paper products company. Surely P&G was the supercompetitive brute of the piece, and K-C was merely displaying admirable competitive pluck?
Maybe. But we spy a clue in the quote. When you wake up every morning plotting to beat the hell out of someone, you are no longer merely reacting. You are living in an irrational zone by choice. You're into it.
Competition steps over the line when it becomes compulsion, and compulsion is bad because it sidesteps a company's carefully planned and stated mission -- in this case, opportunities for workers, return for shareholders, and growth for the company -- all for the thrill of engagement.
Companies that forsake nichemanship in favor of head-to-head, win-lose confrontations must recognize that they are operating not from a deck of 52 orderly playing cards but from a mysterious tarot deck, whose every card is the face of an unconscious impulse, and the deck is not being dealt from the top.
If leaders lose this high-stakes game, and all that goes with it -- jobs, invested dollars, and a future -- will they be able to shrug it off to the company's stakeholders as a "good game"?
Meanwhile, things do change. Every thousand years our neocortexes get a little curlier, and the amygdala occupies a smaller portion of the cranium. And the explicit knowledge we've been sharing -- the sum of all the books and phone calls and conversations and dictabelts -- evolves slowly into something like wisdom.
This is the wisdom that we see at work in the Microsoft-Apple collaboration, two sworn enemies finding common cause. We see it in South Africa, where whites and blacks are working together to fight racism, street crime, and a legacy of cruelty. We see it at United Airlines, where workers are owners, and entrepreneurial spirits are flying high. We see it at the NUMMI plant in Fresno, California, where management and workers are setting aside ancient misgivings to make the best cars in North America. We see it in the city of Hong Kong, where an extraordinary amalgam of competitive capitalism and collaborative socialism is fashioning a world city for a new millennium. And God bless them, we even see it at the nexus of American competitive fervor, Nike, Inc., which is moving forward on, of all things, collaborative sports sponsorship ventures with Japan and Brazil. People are overcoming "human nature" by putting human nature more fully into play.
Our utopia would be one in which our skills of societal restraint become so great that we curb our worst excesses, and our communities become places where people can do interesting things without doing it at one another's mortal expense.
In our research, we came across a wonderful obscure word describing this version of the open society: Synedelphia, literally, "the city of connectedness," a place where continuous winning is the order of the day, and violators of the order are kept on a taut psychological leash.
If there is a weakness to this scheme, it is that it is fundamentally rational. In a world of many little Hitlers we are calling for balance and reason, and failing those, eternal vigilance. Perhaps one or two Hitlers can be reasoned with, but certainly not all of them.
If you assume competition and collaboration are hardwired into you, that they are in your brain and your genes like sexual preference or eye color, you and your organization will not be able to make much headway against it. But if you believe that you are rational and have free will and can alter or shape, if not root out completely those habits you identify as destructive or counterproductive, then there is hope.
Though we have pushed examples of nature upon you all through this book, we ultimately urge that you go against nature, and work less from your amygdala and more from your neocortex. People, by being conscious, are unlike other creatures; we have the unique capacity to step beyond instinct and intuition to create conscious new paths for ourselves, to "change our natures."
Brutes are not Brutes because they make rational choices to be that way, anymore than Hermits or Pawns decide consciously every day to spend their time hiding under a rock or wincing under the lash. The moment we become rational, we move inward from the extremes of the scale. Transcompetition is the art of tinkering with our natural inclinations, and devising strategies for ourselves that are based on long-term, not short-term advantage.
In Synedelphia we have choices, transcompetitive choices to elect the best tactics from both end of the scale. We can choose the best approach for the situation at hand, or we can continue to operate out of our blind habit of choice -- cruelty, deception, submission and withdrawal.
We can do better.
Pop Quiz
Sometimes people think they've read a book, but they thay haven't paused to knit it all together, so its lessons arre quickly lost. Here, in a nutshell, are the key points of this book:
To contact the authors
| Harvey Robbins | Michael Finley |
| Robbins & Robbins | 1841 Dayton Avenue |
| 2475 Ridgewater Drive | Saint Paul, MN 55104 |
| Minnetonka, MN 55343 | 651-644-4540 |
| 612-544-9260 | mfinley@mfinley.com |
| robbi004@maroon.tc.umn.edu | http://mfinley.com |
