Comments

I'm of two minds on the ultimate virtue of the approach, but one truly excellent result, when crafted as specifically as the Saturn mission statement is it's non-static. Because it's obvious Honda is a moving target, it's clear to anyone at Saturn who is capable of understanding trends that the definition of achieving the mision is going to evolve as Honda evolves and adapts and changes.

I like it in this case -- it makes it clear, easy to measure and explicit that the mission's not a single target but an organic, evolving trajectory, a verb not a noun.

Posted by jeff angus at February 28, 2006 6:51 PM

Absolutely, positively, without question.....beating the competition needs to be a mantra of any company.

You are in a competition every day whether you want to be or not.

The client is #1 but winning the chance to solve their challenges will be done via a competition. Even sole source is a form of shutting out the competition.

Posted by Jeff at February 28, 2006 9:43 PM

Agree with you on competition being the frame of reference. But if employees were to be engaged consciously based on metrics involving competitions performance and if you were a leader in the market with a sizable and comfortable market share which is growing every quarter then it does open room for complacency to set in (mindset of the employee to be factored in). In my opinion you need a judicious mix of competition metrics and internal targets set by the employees themselves to keep forging ahead.

Posted by KP at March 1, 2006 1:23 AM

Recent studies once again showed that payment for performance is much less of a motivator as the challenge to succeed is. I would venture to guess that personal challenge would outway beating someone else also.

There has been a shift in the objectives of competition in my mind. Competition, when I was younger, was a healthy game. Today, it seems more menacing to me. Competition is perceived by many, like myself, as a cold and cut-throat activity. It resonates with conflict today, when it seemed more of a neighborly, ethically-controlled pursuit years ago. Friendly competition may well improve performance, but aggressive competiton can bring out the evil in business (as it does in the fanatics of sport), and threaten peer relationships. It has become more of competition at any cost - fight to the death stuff today.

This is gutteral stuff, mind you, and not based on anything more than my own perceptions.

Collaboration, rather than competition, in my opinion will bring out the best for the most of us.

Posted by Tom O'Leary at March 1, 2006 3:02 AM

The concept of collaboration as a model for advancement in technology is evidenced by the availability of share-ware and social applications available to us today. Go to ning.com, find an application that someone else created, modify it (if you are technically able), improve it, and leave it for others to advance even further to suit their own needs. This collaborative approach is the way forward. Content sharing, knowledge-sharing, and creative monetization.

I am using open-source software for word processing today. It's free and as good as MS Products out there. Go to openoffice.org and ning.com and see collaboration at work.

Sharing information and knowledge inspires others to do so as well, and collaboratively, we will advance much quicker than competing against each other.

Posted by Tom O'Leary at March 1, 2006 3:08 AM

Who are you competing against? (Serious question)

Other companies in your sector? - in 5 years time your sector may not exists. It isn't usually your immediate competition that kills you it's a paradigm shift in your market.

The big boys in the general market? I work in Software - many companies compete and partner (at the same time!) with big boys like microsoft so who is the competition and how do you compete here?

Interestingly many of our customers actually want us to partner with our competitors so that the market in space in general provides solutions to what they need.

Personally I would prefer to compete against an existing, pervasive mindset rather than another entity - that's a real world changing challenge!

Posted by PaulH at March 1, 2006 3:52 AM

Sorry to Butt in guys & gals. I've just read the Ground Rules for posting comments & it doesn't say anything about changing the subject so here goes. . .
I've just finished Re-Imagine! The reason I'm writing is, I'd just like to say I think this is a great book. So Great in fact that I have adapted an entirely different view of my job/work. I have also started telling people about this book by e-mailing them the link to the free second chapter and telling them to prepare for a disturbing read. Note: If you do this, please ask the person you e-mail the chapter to NOT to print it out. WASTE. Buy it, or borrow it. More environmentally considerate.
Now Tom. For people who've read 'in search of excellence' or who may even have read some published articles of yours over the last few years, Re-Imagine! will certainly have provoked some serious thinking. But for people who've never read a business book in their lives this could just be a BIG experience. I had some people approach me earlier who I've e-mailed the link to and they looked very excited indeed.
Tell your fans to e-mail the link to anyone who is experiencing mid-life-crisis, has just lost their job or has just quit their job because of mental fatigue or depression or whatever. You are missing a very large audience. This book is not just about business, it's about survival in the new world of work. The best book I've read since 'being digital' & that was oooooh 11 years ago now. Doesn't time fly. Thanks for a great book Tom, Steve.

Posted by Steve at March 1, 2006 3:59 AM

Competition is good…indeed great but there are some unique features of competition

a) It’s many a times more said than done. Do we really practice what we preach? How many firms do a NEAT & CLEAN competitor analysis prior to strategy making / decision-taking?
b) It (competition) doesn’t usually have a human face (it gets ruthless at times to the extent that the basic premise (competitive strategy) is diluted / lost)
c) Competition KILLS Competition – Many organizations consciously create internal competition amongst their brands (Names not disclosed for obvious reasons) and supposedly watch it grow (dwindle many a times!)
d) Competition is UNSTABLE
e) There are a few things in this wide world that are destined / designed to play within the four walls of MONOPOLY…you jus cant do anything about it!
f) Competition is not an exact SCIENCE (do we end up having a cause & effect relationship always? Or can scientific forecasting be done? Do accurate predictions pass on the message to the market? Does competition involve scientific reasoning always?)

To conclude, I must say its good to be competitive & nurture the spirit / essence of competition since it has been proved time & again that competition has been a major recipe for success in a developed (developing) economy.

Posted by K.Sriram at March 1, 2006 4:47 AM

Mike,
I didn't get to see either of the programmes that you mention, but I think the point you raise is an excellent one. The competitive dynamic that I fully applaud is the one that stimulates individuals or teams to achieve excellence, or mastery in their profession. Competitions do seem to be able to stimulate that desire to achieve high standards. However, as many of our bloggers above have pointed out, competition can be a mixed blessing. It does challenge people to achieve great things, but at its worst it can be 'menacing and cutthroat' and fights today's rather than tomorrow's battle.

Tom O'Leary's point about the emergence of collaborative work communities around the development of technology certainly challenges us to see work differently. From what I know of open source collaboration, individuals who take part do so for the personal kudos and sense of achievement. Maybe the competition we need to engender around us in future will revolve much more around individuals aspiring to achieve the respect of colleagues, customers, and (heaven forbid?) so-called competitors?

Posted by Madeleine McGrath at March 1, 2006 6:29 AM

Two points. I work in the UK and I feel that especially with quoted companies the word winning has, unfortunately, gone out of business because if you are that specific about winning then you will be too judged in the short term on your progress. Also I would say you need to constantly look at who your competitors are e.g. microsoft - so busy putting PC's on desk forgot about Google and Apple. Know your competitors..know your future competitors to win

Posted by Farms at March 1, 2006 7:41 AM

We shouldn't confuse collaboration with competition. The two freely cohabitate in today's business world.

Collaboration is a means of competing. If you don't participate in the collaboration going on in your industry (i.e. you try to go it alone), you will lose the competition. The innovation, the differentiation, comes in leveraging the results of that collaboration to offer solutions and capabilities your competition can't match.

Competition is cut-throat. Yours will be cut if you don't compete. No one is asking your permission or whether you wish to compete. Your competition will collaborate, innovate, and drive new business models to better meet the needs of your customers.

Competing isn't short-term. That thinking will cause you to lose the competition. If you don't constantly change you lose the competiton.

The statements above are about organizations. As for what drives people to produce, competition gets the blood boiling for some people. Respect, a feeling of accomplishment, money, the feeling that you are helping others, etc. get it done for others. But let's make it very clear that the organization must compete or the competition will drive it out of existence.

Posted by Jeff at March 1, 2006 8:23 AM

Dear Tom,

I am a Project management consultant and has been a fan of your writings over the years. Always wondered if some of your teachings could be incorporated into a powerful software solution. I believe, based on the little i read from a Washington Post story and the website, RollStream might be the solution that answers my question. When you get time take a look and i am sure you will be fascinated by the concept.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/Search?keywords=rollstream

http://www.rollstream.com

Warm Regards,

John Casey

Posted by John Casey at March 1, 2006 8:25 AM

Competition, like many things, can be dangerous in the extreme but to some extent it's an essential part of business. How can you hope to compete / succeed if you don't know who your competitors are for which of your products or services and in which market niches? How do you know where to pitch the basic offering, the pricing, the service etc unless you know what your competitors are doing and you find a way to differentiate from (i.e. compete with) your competitors.

The danger with the collaboration road, it seems to me, is that we all share ideas and end up developing similar products with similar features at similar prices. Tom's got a slide about this...! It may be appropriate for some of the products in your portfolio but ultimately I think you have to know your market and your competitors - and compete for your chosen sectors.

Posted by MarkJF at March 1, 2006 8:37 AM

Good point Jeff. Competition is indeed necessary to survive in business. Every successful venture has a unique selling proposition or something that sets it apart from others offering similar products/services.

Competition is healthy when it is focused on providing value that others in the game aren't. It becomes unhealthy and counter-productive when you focus on 'beating' the other guy rather than creating value for the customer.

There are people out there who see competition as cut-throat, engaging in click fraud, for example, to increase advertising costs of their competitors using Google Paid Search strategies. That type of competition doesn't improve anyone's performance - it's value-less.

But you are right in stating that competition is a necessary and natural part of business. Without it, the customer would suffer. Healthy competition benefits everyone.

Posted by Tom O'Leary at March 1, 2006 9:00 AM

"They wanted to win. Not make this a better world, not meet some greater societal obligation, not satisfy shareholders ... they just wanted to beat their competition."

Got to be careful with this. This can lead to the ENRON thing. The truly great competitor knows that their sport is something greater than the win AND knows the goal is to win. I think of the great distance runner Emil Zatopek who was an incredible competitor, but also was gracious off the track, helping other athletes.

Collins – Built to Last – ‘beware of the tyranny of the OR’

Posted by Kurt at March 1, 2006 9:24 AM

I recognize that competition at some level seems fundamental to our existence, yet there seems to be an opportunity for balance. Winner-take-all business competition puts people out of work and destroys products others may be counting on. Even open source software has both collaboration (people working together who aren't part of the same official organization) and competition (will Abiword or Writer become more popular?).

I just finished John Bogle's Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/2006/02/battle-for-soul-of-capitalism.html) , and he makes a telling (to me) argument that we've lost something important societally as the focus of work, especially in the case of professional service organizations, has moved from serving the client to winning in business.

In the end, I think we need collaboration and we need competition and, at the forefront, we need a focus on important goals. We face important challenges in this world, many of which you've written about here. Focusing on those important challenges and our contribution to solving them just seems like the smart way to guide and limit our actions, letting competition (and collaboration) be led by that focus and not the other way around.

Posted by Bill Harris at March 1, 2006 10:54 AM

The 'beat the competition' mantra is too often used in the worst ways. Instead of beating the competition in differentiation and making a difference, it is beating them in sales. It reminds me of back in 1999-2000 or so, when Cadillac deliberately misstated sales to retain the luxury sales crown.

This stands in stark contrast to Garcia's exhortation to be the only ones who do what you do. Where's the competition if you are that differentiated?

Posted by Eric Ralph at March 1, 2006 11:11 AM

Mike, I think this "winning" thing is quite personal. I was just reading David Bolchover's excellent book, The Living Dead, nodding about the chances of having a fulfilling career in a large corporation these days being close to zero, and knowing that more and more talented folks are sensibly chosing to start up or work in small, less than 50 people, firms. Just staying in business becomes a daily competition that has to be won, and the win/lose criteria are transparently obvious to everyone. I can contrast this with past corporate days of my own when the other big divisions of our company seemed to be the competition and winning for me was about getting and spending a bigger slug of corporate budget for my group than my opposite numbers in other divisions could. It's still about winning, but what battle?

Posted by Richard King at March 1, 2006 11:14 AM

Growing up in the US, I certainly understand competition and the will to win.

In 30 years of business, as an employee, as a manager, as a consultant, I've been asked many times to lie or misrepresent in the course of competing. I am not faultless, but I can only imagine the increasing levels of this behavior in the name of competition and winning is weakening the foundations (and the reliability of financial statements) of businesses around the world.

Posted by Perspective at March 1, 2006 11:41 AM

One more quick thought: when I was first starting my small consulting business, a friend in the same business told me that we all had a choice. We could see the world as having plenty of opportunities or a scarcity of opportunities. Those who saw plenty tended to collaborate on serving others, and, in the process, they often seemed to expand the total market. Those who saw scarcity tended to compete for a bigger piece of the (perceived to be small or shrinking) pie; in the process, they sometimes seemed to accelerate its shrinkage.

I was tempted to say those thoughts were related to virtuous and vicious cycles, and they probably are. It's not clear to me this morning that a philosophy of plenty should correspond to virtuous and a philosophy of scarcity should correspond to vicious cycles, though.

I think that passion about a goal is great, but I think that goal can (and should be) a contribution, not just the winning. Even in your WOW message, I hear WOWing the world by the contribution you make, not WOWing the world by the number of companies you've buried and people you've sent to the unemployment lines.

Posted by Bill Harris at March 1, 2006 11:51 AM

Competition rules world-wide that is for sure whether in the Olympics [and China planning to pounce on 2008 gold medals] or at Wal*Mart and / or Google expanding into new services ...

Posted by Sean at March 1, 2006 2:11 PM

Wow...thanks for the responses folks. I see wisdom in all of them. My point is not that winning for winning sake is good. Of course it should make some meaningful contribution. But I also believe that it is quite okay, and even desirable, to be in business with people that want to win. And that means somebody is going to lose. Bill Harris, I agree with your thoughts, but even though there may be plenty of business to go around...I still think winning means having more of it than my competition. You know, GM and Toyota collaborated with NUUMI...but there was little doubt that Toyota wants all of GM's market share.
Thanks all....

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Winning ...mmmmm ... I can't help but think about all the thousands of folks around the world training now for the Olympic 100 metres event in London in 2012. They will train and pound their bodies for the next six years dreaminng of winning that Gold Medal. Of course there will be only one winner of that gold medal. Does that make the other several thousand people 'losers?'

Not in my opinion. They are competitors and only one athlete wins. It is just plain wrong to label folks 'losers' if they are not 'winners' if you get my point.

I am not saying settle for less than excellence or 100% effort. I am saying we cannot all be 'winners' if you consider gold medal winners as the only 'winner'

Words are important and we need to be careful how we define winners

Posted by Trevor Gay at March 1, 2006 5:14 PM

Hi Mike,

Nice to see someone in the Tom Peters clan tackling this topic with an open mind. We have blogged extensively on the topic of competitiveness including comparisons between Blue Ocean (naive) and George Stalk's Hardball (reality). Seems to me Tom had extreme heartburn with Hardball. Any thoughts on Blue Ocean vs. Hardball?

Posted by Mike Smock at March 1, 2006 8:57 PM

I would love to know how many start-up entrepreneurs actually start their business in order to compete (I mean head to head against another business). I suspect that most startups are because of a sense of vision around creating a better, different world because they have a killer app or new idea.

Yes the environment they face is going to be competitive in terms of other businesses but I suspect the true competition is within themselves and against an existing mindset/paradigm. Overcoming that can be just as much (if not more) of a driver than ABC widgets down the road. Isn’t this where true progress is made both economically and in driving mankind forward????

I suppose you could define this as a competition between your vision and the existing reality

Posted by PaulH at March 2, 2006 7:21 AM

the 'competition is great' lobby need to go back to kindergarten to learn a few rules of life... rule number one, simple rules are only attractive to simpletons...

Posted by funkyblakgal at March 2, 2006 8:45 AM

Mike - GM shall rise again perhaps except their health care and pension costs per car [new Business Week] are about $1250 vs $250 for Toyota. WOW what a major cost diff to overcome - the last of the big unions in cars, airlines and USA public education get FAT while not COMPETING - families lose all over.

viagra pharmacy price canada Can still remember how when I told grade school teachers of career dreams - they doubted it - maybe thought one should be a welder - and that beat goes on 30 years later - while I was #1 in MBA class - big ED USA unions are killing competiveness - alliance with Democrats provides for future 7-11 clerk training and poor class Dems "love" to death.

Posted by Sean at March 2, 2006 10:07 AM

Well Sean, I think many in GM own this problem. I worked directly for many of the folks now running the show, and let me assure you they are not Democrats. I think Roger Smith had far more to do with the demise of GM's competitiveness than Joe Shopfloor. It is just a matter of perspective...ask foreign farmers how easy it is to compete with US farm subsidies....I don't excuse the UAW; they made this bed, now let them lie in it. But, by no means can you underestimate the sheer lack of design creativity, innovation, and just plain market savvy of the GM's management. The fix is farmore complex than blaming labor or management...

Posted by Mike at March 2, 2006 10:16 AM

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Mike I agree but you catch my drift too - GM has been dino-fossil lead to the brink - I hope to buy a GM car next time once they downsize and add quality. However Toyota-Lexus is so JD Power quality and resale value hard to resist - and especially since they set the pace in hybrid cars too.

Posted by Sean at March 2, 2006 11:09 AM

Tom O'Leary, competition resonates with conflict?

Since when did conflict become bad?

I celebrate conflict. Without it, we would all simply accept the status quo. Blindly accept others' opinions, ideas, and beliefs.

Hurray for conflicting ideas! Salute the contrarians, the purple cows, and the WOWers!

You can stand idly by, but I'll rock the boat and one of us will make a big splash.

Posted by DUST!N at March 3, 2006 6:12 PM

I agree Dustin. My use of conflict was in terms of unhealthy conflict - as in that of a destructive relationship or war. Conflict, like stress, can be good or bad - a motivator or a counterproductive productivity stopper.

Should have made it more clear. I'm with you in the context that you share!

Posted by Tom O'Leary at March 3, 2006 7:02 PM

Conflict and chaos rule too much of the Mid East sect v sect homocide maniacs must be eliminated in a competitive way - pay per view executions of terrorists perhaps - donate proceeds to victims.

Posted by Sean at March 5, 2006 10:26 AM

Sean - violence begets violence. It has from the beginning of time. War has never and will never make man more peaceful. War and conflict will continue to be waged until the end of time because we haven't evolved ethereally as a species, and will continue to justify murder in our own ways [jihaad, freedom, hatred, protection, fear] until we do.

Posted by Tom O'Leary at March 6, 2006 9:48 AM

Tom O',

True. Yet without strength (economics, military, global politics) and the threat to use it, diplomacy would be empty.

Also... agreed. Conflict in and of itself is really neither good nor bad. It depends on how it is wielded. What I can say is this: It is necessary.

Posted by DUST!N at March 6, 2006 11:57 AM

Hi all

Just a little input from the South afrcian dynamic. I certainly think that competition is a motivator but also believe that collaboration should be encouraged in order to create bigger and better magic for the client. In my little experience from the SOuth African business world, I wander if there is a maturation phase in the business arena a country or economy has to get to before it moves from 'beat the competition' to collaboration or is ot not as cut and dried as that? Would love to know your thoughts.

Posted by Glen Sampson at March 7, 2006 12:37 AM