Competition is for losers
Language of sports poor guide for business world
For more than a century now, the business world has borrowed liberally from the parallel world of sports for much of its language and conceptual terminology. "Level playing field," "rules of the game," touch base," "team player," "ballpark figure" and "fast track" are among the many phrases that have become entrenched in the vocabulary of commerce.
But overshadowing all these is the very notion of "competition" itself, a concept that slides with effortless ease between the two worlds. No surprise, then, in the wake of the recent Olympic Games, that the success of Canadian athletes has inspired corporations to embrace such phrases as "We're going for gold" and "We deliver a medal-winning performance."
The danger in transporting ideas and language from one realm of life into another is that you end up confusing the two separate activities. One example of this is the recent habit of referring to those who form Canada's foreign trade missions as "Team Canada," as if they intended to skate or curl for contracts in Asia or Africa. The cute "team" jackets and berets they dutifully wear only compounds this confusion.
The very concept of competition is flawed, especially when applied to the world of business. The basic notion of free-market competition can be traced back to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in the late 1700s, but in the past three decades or so a vigorous cult of competition has come to dominate global economic and political thought. The mantra of the market has become so loud that it drowns out all opposition. The fact that neither productivity nor real wages have improved significantly in recent years is simply ignored.
Well, it's time to admit that the sporting notion of competition was always a poor choice of metaphor in our pursuit of economic advance. Here's why.
Advocates of unadulterated competition – and these days that includes many on the political left as well as the right – usually make any or all of the following claims: (a) competition is natural and therefore good, (b) competition clearly distinguishes winners from losers, and (c) competition promotes efficiency. Attractive as they may sound, none of these claims stands up to close scrutiny.
First, drawing loosely on Darwinian theory, supporters of competition argue that natural selection is beneficial because it weeds out sick, weak or otherwise inferior specimens. Applied to the world of business, a similar process serves to eliminate weaker or outdated companies and so helps to raise the overall level of economic performance. One consequence of this belief is that governments are ill-advised to support ailing or "lame duck" enterprises – better to let them die.
The problem is that the whole argument rests on a shaky foundation of circular logic. Who survives? The fittest, of course. How do we know they're the fittest? Because they survived. In short, as long as you accept the first – and unproven – assumption (i.e. "survival of the fittest") then all else follows. No external or verifiable evidence is required to demonstrate "fitness."
Claim number two is that competition simplifies the world into winners and losers, and that the performance of each can be assessed simply by reference to outcome. In other words, you won the gold, therefore you must be the best. It's not how you play the game, it's whether you win or lose that counts.
On one level, this is obvious. All sports – with the possible exception of test match cricket – are played with the expectation of a positive result. However, it remains important to distinguish between any specific result and the game itself. After all, at the outset of any NHL season, everyone knows that there can be only one eventual champion, and that the odds of your own team winning are inevitably small. Yet even in Calgary, fans turn out in their thousands, game after game, to watch a team they know has absolutely no chance of triumph. Why? Because there is a difference between the outcome (actual or anticipated) and the activity.
So it is in business, too. It's quite possible – and historically demonstrable – for individuals to take pleasure in the act of creating and/or selling a product without reference to any artificial division of the world into winners and losers.
Finally, fans of competition argue that it promotes efficiency. Again, however, this is misleading. Take the recent Olympics, for example. Championed as the pinnacle of competition, this event was in fact a monument to wastage and inefficiency. Hundreds, if not thousands, of athletes competed, only a handful of whom had any realistic chance of winning a medal. Behind all the rest who went home empty-handed stood countless years and millions of dollars thrown away on fruitless training and preparation.
A similar state of affairs exists in the business world. Driven by the ceaseless struggle of competition, the vast majority of companies eventually end up on the scrap heap – even the once mighty Eatons proved to be mortal. As such, they represent a massive expenditure of money, time, labour and human ingenuity just thrown away, often through no fault of their own other than that they succumbed to the "demands of competition." There simply isn't room on the podium for everyone.
So even as our Salt Lake heroes begin the alchemy of turning Olympic gold into commercial brass, perhaps it's time to reflect on the dubious merits of competition itself. After all, at least in sports you eventually get to the finish line. |
