The catastrophe of supercollaboration

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

(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

Given its downsides, we should approach pure collaboration just as carefully and consciously as we approach pure competition. Teams don't always work, and not every task is suited to team solutions.

But wait, it gets worse. When pundits worry about where our supercompetitive age is heading, they usually talk about the haves eventually getting everything, and the have-nots losing everything.

But that is not a vision of an end, but of an unstable condition occurring just before the real end, a snapback from supercompetition to its exact opposite, supercollaboration.

Think fall of the Roman Empire. Think Dark Ages. This will be a whole worldful of martyrs, in which progress is nil because no competitive fire is pushing individuals to achieve, and "codes of conduct" curtail all experimentation.

To get a bead on what the coming supercollaborative age might be like, unless we come to grips with supercompetition, let's examine recent history.

Since the end of World War II, the competitive dynamism of the world's economies was held in check by the Cold War. Because the USSR and USA both had nuclear weapons, neither was willing to expand recklessly. Neither side wanted to do anything too provocative, or supercompetitive.

Domino theory to the contrary, fewer nation borders changed in this period than did after World War I. The threat of mutual destruction forced a kind of "limited modified competitive hangout" upon the postwar period. Two powerful rivals, with opposite philosophies, each did everything in their power to avoid doing something to set the other off.

The limited modified hangout ended when capitalism won the cold war. Competitive restraint has been replaced by an urgent new breed of nearly pure competitiveness. People from the mightiest to the lowliest are aware as never before that they live in a world where people far away can snatch the meat off their table.

We fret about out personal ability to compete, be employed, and bring in money.

We fret about our organizations, and whether they will be lean and able to learn fast enough to compete with their competitors.

We fret about our schools, and whether they are equipping our kids to compete against the schoolkids of Japan, Russia, and Singapore.

We fret about our whole society caving in competitively, letting the hordes of more competitive countries march in and help themselves.

Our response to stepped-up competition is reminsiscent of the arms race: we step it up even further. If everyone is competing, we shift into overdrive and supercompete -- take no prisoners, give no quarter, duel to the death.

The spirit of capitalism, competition, is finally given free rein. Every industrial and developing power on earth is locked in a struggle to establish and maintain footholds in world markets. Manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Bolivia belch smoke around the clock. Supercompetition is a car driving all out, with the pedal to the metal.

Everyone is working harder to do better -- to win.

How long can this continue? The Brute Cycle tells us that supercompeters are usually brought down by the very people they thought they had squashed. Speeding cars eventually burn up their engines, run out of gas, or lose control, and when they lose control, as Japan's economy has in recent years, the momentum of their catastrophe threatens to take out every other car on the track.

Signs that this kind of collapse may be drawing near abound. In the business of professional sports, runaway player salaries have resulted in higher ticket prices and stadium bail-out plans that take public money and invest it in one of the most speculative businesses.

When 21-year-old basketball center Kevin Garnett announced in August 1997 that he would decline an offer of $103.5 to play for the Minnesota Timberwolves of the National Basketball Association, the decision sent shivers all the way over to another professional sport, baseball, where the Minnesota Twins have been lobbying for public support of a stadium.

"There is a greater fear today -- the most legitimate fear -- that the whole thing is escalating so much that it's not sustainable," said a state representative. How do you sell the public on underwriting a game they can't afford to attend? But how do you get talented, supercompetitive players to ask for anything less than the richest teams, int he biggest markets, are willing to pay?

And it's happening in big-bucks book publishing. HarperCollins, one of the most respected publishers, announced in August 1997 that it was canceling over 100 titles from its fall booklist, letting 420 people go, and writing off $279 million in losses. The reason: the company had lost too much money publishing celebrity blockbusters, like Johnnie Cochrane's Journey to Justice, that didn't sell. As with sports, publishers must compete to deliver the highest contract to celebrity writers. When a celebrity book fails, publishers cut costs they only way they can, by eviscerating the budgets of non-celebrity authors. It doesn't help when the publisher is supercompetitor Rupert Murdoch.

In each case, the pigs -- the top athletes, the publishers, the celebrities, and their agents -- get to feast while stars of lesser magnitude pick up the tab. In each case the loser is the public, which grows wearier of empty books and superstar egos every season. These industries are competing their way to collapse.

SnapBack

If competitive expansion were infinitely possible, that would be bad, but people could probably muddle along. The rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer, infinitely.

But it isn't possible. All trends ultimately reach a tension point where they reverse themselves. A world stretched to the breaking point by supercompetition is likely to snap back to its diametric opposite, supercollaboration.

We are not likely to like supercollaboration much. It won't be mild collaboration like teams and empowerment and democracy. It will be more like mob anarchy. The center will no longer hold.

Already we are seeing it in the rise of tinpot fiefs, run by people no longer afraid of the big powers -- Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Russian Mafia, the Freemen of Montana, the Independent State of Texas, the Aum sarin gas cult of Japan and Heaven's Gate in San Diego, groups wielding coercive power over their members because there is no balancing power to offset their tyranny.

Pure collaboration is an environment in which progress is forbidden and individual achievement is discouraged. To those who like that sort of thing, it will have the relative serenity of a Trappist monastery. To those for whom Trappist monasteries hold no special appeal, it will seem like, well, a Trappist monastery -- silent and constraining, like a straightjacket and gag.

When the world is all Martyrs and no Predators, we'll miss the Brutes' verve. There will be no armies vying for one another's territory; on the other hand, we'll all feel like we're in the army.

Imagine a complete rejection of the competitive spirit, blaming it for all the evils of recent times. Conformity and sacrifice for others will be primary civic values. Entrepreneurism and innovation will sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to people. Anyone with any sort of individual spark will have it preemptively snuffed. Anyone with a better idea will think better before expressing it.

That is our dreaded supercollaborative scenerio. A little short on specifics, true -- but when it comes, that will be its hallmark. Call the Big Vague. Anything that seems individual, unique, or nonfuzzy will be shaved, sanded, or guillotined back into shape.

Something like that will happen sometime, and maybe soon -- unless people become more conscious of, and more appropriate with, their competitive habits.

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