Transcompetition—Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley
ISBN: 0070530823
For years, the common held belief system of most economic schools of thought was that competition made participating members stronger by bringing out their best; then, along came the collaborative approach. This new approach formed teams and partnerships in an effort to create a uniformity of purpose in an effort to build success for multiple people at the same time. The problem with the competition model is that it seeks to destroy opponents in order to capture more of the market share. The problem with the different collaborative models is that, oftentimes, performance is traded in for some form of social/emotional equillibrium. Since the introduction of the internet and widespread use of computers into the economic arena, the business environment has been going through some fundamental major changes, seemingly at breakneck speed. Transcompetition is the term that is used to describe a fusion of the best aspects of competition and the best aspects of collaboration. The authors of this book drew upon the fields of anthropology, psychology, history, biology, as well as economics to propose a new business management model back in 1998. The model basically states that the best managed businesses do not necessarily prescribe to one system of thought over the other. Any organization that uses a hybrid of these two popular approaches, competition and collaboration, is poised to seize a clear advantage throughout the twenty-first century.
_______________________________
A competitive, ‘serve yourself first’ mentality is what the ‘American Dream’ was built upon. Competition, the act of beating a rival in order to achieve supremacy in a given field, creates winners and losers. Without losers, there can not be winners; and without winners there cannot be an accumulation of wealth in order to grow ‘me and my own’. This is what the natural world is built upon, 'survival of the fittest', right?
On the other end of the spectrum is collaboration, the squishy, ‘feel good’ mentality where things like emotion and self worth oftentimes get in the way of succeeding. While many elementary schools tout their experiential learning or inclusive classrooms or their collaborative communication or their social/emotional curricula, we should be asking ourselves whether or not we are preparing the students of today to be productive members of the business world tomorrow.
The simple fact of the matter is that the entire business community, for the most part, is built upon the competitive model. Most high schools and colleges, as well as all graduate school programs are highly competitive. Students take tests and are graded and ranked and denied opportunities based upon their performance in school. In the business world, companies go out of business, professionals are fired, and whole industries dry up based upon performance and competition with one’s peers. Life may not have been fair back then, but up until the spread of information began being sent out freely across the internet, ‘life wasn’t fair’.
Things have changed in the past decade in terms of looking at the effectiveness of competition. Problems have started to develop with the competitive business model. As global population figures continue to rise alongside resource consumption, and more and more people achieve a middle class lifestyle, we are starting to realize that there are limits to the natural world. What happens if China, India, the whole Middle East and much of southeast Asia all come of age at the same time and begin competing for the same resources that are already in short supply when only America and Europe are demanding for them? What do we do about South America and much of Africa; do we ignore their cries for some semblance of economic equality or do we search for a better economic model that can accommodate more of the people who live on this planet and want the same for themselves and their children as we currently have in the U.S.? Sticking to the competitive model of doing business will invariably lead to more wars.
Collaborative communities on the other hand, have entered the mainstream mostly through the introduction of the internet. The world wide web is more of an information portal than it is an arena for competition. In the past decade competition has been slowly being replaced by collaboration-the act of working together with adversaries in an attempt to define and then achieve a common end. We are beginning to change our very definition of inclusion to be everyone, even our 'enemies' and those who are not part of ‘the game’ yet.
With the internet, obscurity can find a partner; in fact, sometimes it can find millions of partners. Groups can form around ideas in virtual worlds using no more energy to develop their ideas than it takes to turn on the computer (which can be quite consumptive collectively). A group used to be only as good as its weakest member or strongest member, but now, it is only as good as the collection and organization of ideas among all of its members. Computer analytics are starting to show that the more people that are included in the formation of an idea, the cheaper and more efficient the deployment of a system that manufactures that idea in the long run will become.
The number of people joining the online community globally is expanding every year. Currently, there are over one billion internet users out there, a number that will continue to rise as more and more countries achieve higher standards of living. This increase of digital traffic is a good sign that the amount of information available to anyone with a computer and a broadband cable or satellite connection will continue to increase. There is so much data developed that the sheer volume of information from individuals logging on and sharing their experiences, expertise, and knowledge is beginning to tax the underlying structure of the world-wide-web. The servers will continue to expand and people will continue to share information across the globe in an effort to make money, share a solution, or any of the multitude of reasons that people log into the digital world.
People are exchanging ideas across oceans at speeds unparalleled in human history and this instantaneous transmission of information is changing our very notion of fundamental business principles. The digital world seems to have different rules than the old school business world.
For starters, it used to be thought that businesses gained advantages by remaining secretive, but actually the opposite is true. Those organizations that support a more open style of communication in their product development end up with a more efficiently manufactured product. Companies that disclose their human rights records and materials used in making products succeed on a different level than those that remain more secretive. Look out Colonel Sanders and CocaCola.
The companies that source collaborative communities for ideas and input end up producing products that are exactly what a customer is demanding. It just happens to turn out right now that more and more customers are interested in their health and their environment. That translates into organic food and products that can either biodegrade or be recycled.
The computer, though, is not all collaboration and no competition. Of course, there is a place for competition in the digital age. The two models work side by side; one sets the stage for the other. While the internet fosters collaboration, computerized manufacturing facilities and automated commercial buildings streamline costs so that businesses can remain competitive or achieve a financial advantage. Let's look at two examples to see how collaboration and competition can be interwoven together.
First, let's look at the creation of electric vehicles. Currently, there are many different ideas circulating around about which battery type to use. Collaboration is a functional way to share information and come up with the best idea and highest performing product. Will it be nickel metal hydride, or will it be lithium ion, or will it be some form of ultracapacitor? Assuming ethical boundaries are maintained throughout the process, one form will rise to the top. Once a battery technology is established as the dominant form, then competitive market principles can take over and be used to mass produce it. Using this type of model, global resources are preserved and waste is kept to a minimum.
Using this same sort of an example to show how competition can run amok without any collaboration in the development phase, take the automobile industry of the 1920’s when cars were still just a concept. Ethical boundaries were neglected, the oil and steel industry lobbies won influence and collaboration with alternate automobile technology companies was formally abandoned. The automobile was mass-produced without any proper vetting as to future repercussions. Pollution, traffic congestion, shortage of natural resources…these were all foreseeable outcomes that could have been avoided if a collaborative model of production was employed. Competition of brand, Ford/Chevy/GM took the place of competition of technology, steam/ethanol/electric and is what has left us in the predicament we face today.
What will this fusion of competition and collaboration evolve into? What will all of these new internet users do over the course of the next decade as they mature into adults? Will they have a fundamentally different way of viewing themselves and the world around them? Will everybody just learn how to get along?
One thing is certain; currently, more and more people are suffering at the hands of pollutive business practices than are benefiting from them, so logic would render that a simple venue like the internet, which encourages maximum participation, would allow for the democratization of the business world. The more voices that can be heard, the more accurate picture of a true majority will unfold.
The majority of the world is voicing their opinion currently in favor of incorporating environmental and social considerations into business practices. This is what the great experiment that is the internet, and I guess America too, has come up with so far. The question left for us to figure out is how to use competition to achieve that goal. These trends meshing reality together with idealism will only amplify throughout the next several decades.
As internet usage spreads into all of the regions of the world, technology and collaboration are already being shared in an effort to cut down on global waste streams. These new online communities, through a collaboration of ideas, have designed software to help manufacturers assess the complete lifecycle of a product through its design or streamline the manufacturing process at their plant to use less energy, or figure out a way to produce less waste or incorporate it back into the production stream somehow.
The creation of thinking communities, where participants seldom, if ever, meet in real life is an exciting development in business strategy. Who knows what would have happened to Henry Ford’s automobile if he posted it on an internet message board and invited public comment. Who know, upon analysis, if the verdict in the twenties would then have rendered the fuel source for his model finite, set to run out in less than one-hundred years and cause growing global conflicts and catastrophic environmental effects. Would we still have pursued the same path the we are currently still on?
The internet acts as a giant filtration system where ideas are fleshed out and some of the initial problems are identified before production. This kind of process cuts down on overall resources consumed when the idea is brought into the production phase. It also allows other users to adopt the idea and tweak it slightly to meet their individual need. Ownership becomes collective, but still in a capitalistic way.
Whether it is in the political arena or the business world, problem solving that considers multiple solutions oftentimes produces more optimal results. The idea that human social networks and cosmological principles such as the formation of the universe both follow similar evolutionary chains is an interesting comparison. The whole universe dances together as the individual components compete for the finite resources within it. Their is a balance to the consumptive principles of the universe.
It is our current business cycles that are out of sync with the larger physical properties driving all matter in the universe. Perhaps, it will take a black hole on earth to ultimately recycle all of our terrestrial material and gadgets, but it would be nice to see a conscious decision on the part of the human species to begin doing this on their own.
Technology is not the enemy; it can help us see those dimensions that, for now, lie outside our current capacity to comprehend them. Visionaries, sometimes, have no idea what it is that they are seeing (the same goes for a computer); they simply are trying to capture an image that keeps repeating in their minds (CPU). Perhaps, some artists (or computers) accidentally stumble upon some of the larger principles that govern our whole universe. The internet gives us all an opportunity to share our vision with others; competition can help us use that vision to streamline our economic system to support a sustainable way of doing business in an overpopulated world.
___________________________web recommendation
NOVA; The Elegant Universe
www.pbs.org
This page will give you an opportunity to familiarize yourself with some more modern theories of the formation of the universe and how it functions. The page has links to other webpages on string theory, multiple dimensions, and elementary particles. If the information on this page proves not to be modern enough for you or satisfactorily establish the link between economic principles and the formation of the universe, then start HERE and continue on at your own risk.
No comments:
Post a Comment