One of the more emotionally charged concepts in our society is competition. Even the word evokes strong feelings, some positive and others adverse. Sometimes, the association is of an impressive athletic or intellectual feat encouraged by a contest. For others, the image is one of congestion, scarcity, and degeneracy. The question I intend to examine is: Is competition good or bad? (The obvious answer is, “it depends.” So the real question is, “on what?”)
In economics, competition is regarded as an absolute necessity, and any Time Warner Cable customer will attest to the evils of monopolies: poor service, high costs, and an overall dismal situation that seems unlikely to improve. (I would argue that a monopoly situation has competition: between the sole supplier and the rest of the world. Ending the monopoly doesn’t “add” competition, but makes more fair the competition that already exists intrinsically.) Competition between firms is generally seen as better than any alternative. Competition within firms is generally regarded as corrosive, although this viewpoint isn’t without controversy.
It’s easy to find evidence that competition can be incredibly destructive. Moreover, competition in the general sense is inevitable. In a “non-competitive” business arrangement such as a monopoly or monopsony, competition is very much in force: just a very unfair variety of it. Is competition ever, however, intrinsically good? To answer this, it’s important to examine two drastically different kinds of competition: competing to excel, and competing to suffer.
Competition to excel is about doing something extremely well: possibly better than it has ever been done before. It’s not about beating the other guy. It’s about performing so well that very few people can reach that level. Was Shakespeare motivated by being better than a specific rival, or doing his own thing? Almost certainly, it was the latter. This style of competition can focus people toward goals that they might otherwise not see. When it exists, it can be a powerful motivator.
In a competition to excel, people describe the emotional frame as “competing against oneself” and enter a state comparable to a long-term analogue of flow. Any rivalries become tertiary concerns. This doesn’t mean that people in competitions to excel never care about relative performance. Everyone would rather be first place than second, so they do care about relative standing, even if absolute performance is given more weight. However, in a competition to excel, you’d rarely see someone take an action that deliberately harms other players. That would be bad sportsmanship: so far outside the spirit of the game that most would consider it cheating.
Competition to suffer is about absorbing more pain and making more sacrifices, or creating the appearance of superior sacrifice. It’s about being the last person to leave the office, even when there isn’t meaningful work left to do. It’s about taking on gnarly tasks with a wider smile on one’s face than the other guy. These contests become senseless wars of attrition. In the working world, sacrifice-oriented competitions tend to encourage an enormous amount of cheating, because people can’t realistically absorb that much pain and still perform at a decent level at basic tasks. With very few exceptions, these contests encourage a lot of bad behavior and are horrible for society.
What’s most common in the corporate world? In most companies, the people who advance are the ones who (a) visibly participate in shared suffering, (b) accept subordination the most easily, and (c) retain an acceptable performance under the highest load (rather than those who perform best under a humane load.) People are measured, in most work environments, based on their decline curves (taken as a proxy for reliability) rather than their capability. So the corporate ladder is, for the most part, a suffering-oriented competition, not an excellence-oriented one. People wonder why we get so few creative, moral, or innovative people in the upper ranks of large corporations. This is why. The selection process is biased against them.
People who do well in one style of competition tend to perform poorly in the other, and the salient trait is context-sensitivity. Highly context-sensitive people, whose performance is strongly correlated with interest in their work, lack of managerial detriment, and overall health, tend to be the most creative and capable of hitting high notes: they win at excellence-oriented contests, but they fail in the long, pointless slogs of corporate suffering contests. People with low context-sensitivity tend to be the last ones standing in suffering-oriented competitions, but they fail when excellence is required. Corporations are configured in such a way that they load up on the latter type in the upper ranks. Highly context-sensitive, creative people are decried as “not a team player” when their motivation drops (as if it were a conscious choice, when it’s probably a neurological effect) due to an environmental malady.
Suffering-oriented competitions focus on reliability and appearance: how attractively a person can do easy, stupid things. John’s TPS reports are as good as anyone else’s, but he has to be reminded to use the new cover sheet. Tom’s does his TPS reports with a smile on his face. Tom gets the promotion. Excellence-oriented competitions have much higher potential payoff. In the workplace, excellence-oriented environments have an R&D flavor: highly autonomous and implicitly trusted workers, and a long-term focus. After the short-sighted and mean-spirited cost-cutting of the past few decades, much of which has targeted R&D departments, there isn’t much excellence-oriented work left in the corporate world.
As businesses become risk-averse, they grow to favor reliability and conformity over creativity and excellence, which are intermittent (and therefore riskier) in nature. Suffering-oriented competitions dominate. Is this good for these companies? I don’t think so. Even in software, the most innovative sector right now, companies struggle so much at nurturing internal creativity that they feel forced to “acq-hire” mediocre startups at exorbitant prices in order to compensate for their own defective internal environments.
The other problem with suffering-oriented competitions is that it’s much easier to cheat, and antisocial behavior is more common. Excellence can’t be faked, and the best players inspire the others. People are encouraged to learn from the superior players, rather than trying to destroy them. In sacrifice-oriented competitions (in the corporate world, usually centered on perceived effort and conformity) the game frequently devolves into an arrangement where people spend more time trying to trip each other up, and not be tripped, than actually working.
Related to this topic, one of the more interesting financial theories is the Efficient Market Hypothesis. It’s not, of course, literally true. (Arbitrage is quite possible, for those with the computational resources.) It is, however, very close to being true. It provides reliable, excellent approximations of relationships between tradeable securities. At it’s heart, though, EMH isn’t about financial markets. It’s about competition itself, and who the prime movers are in a contest. Fair prices do not require all (possibly competing) parties to be maximally informed about the security being traded (since that’s obviously not the case). One well-informed participant (a market-maker) with enough liquidity is often enough to set prices at the fair level based on current knowledge. Competitions, in other words, tend to be dominated by a small set of players who are the “prime movers”. By whom? Excellence-oriented competitions are dominated by the best: the most skilled, capable, talented or energetic. Suffering-oriented competitions tend to be dominated by the stupidest, and by “stupidest”, I mean something that has nothing to do with intelligence but, rather, “willing to take the shittiest deal”.
That said, in the real world, the Gervais Principle applies. The stupidest (the Clueless) are a force, but those who can manipulate the competition from outside (i.e. cheat) tend to be the actual winners. They are the Sociopaths. The sociopaths shift blame, take credit, and seem to be the most reliable, best corporate citizens by holding up (socially and intellectually) under immense strain. The reality is that they aren’t suffering at all. Even if they can’t get a managerial role (and they usually can) they will find some way to delegate that shit. They win suffering-oriented competitions by externalizing the suffering, and remain socially pleasant and well-slept enough to take the rewards. So suffering-oriented competitions, if cheating is possible, aren’t really dominated by the stupidest, so much as by the slimiest.
Intuitively, people understand the difference between excellence- and suffering-oriented competition. Consider the controversy associated with doping in sports. These performance-enhancing drugs have horrific, long-term side effects. They take what would otherwise be a quintessential excellence-oriented competition and inject an element of inappropriate sacrifice: willingness to endure long-term health risks. The agent (performance-enhancing drugs) that turns an excellence competition into a sacrifice-oriented one must be disallowed. People have an emotional intuition that it’s cheating to use such a thing. Athletes are discouraged from destroying their long-term health in order to improve short-term performance, with the knowledge that allowing this behavior will require most or all of the top contestants to follow suit. But in the corporate world, no such ethics exist. Even six hours of physical inactivity (sitting at a desk) is bad for a person’s long-term health, but that’s remarkably common, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs that would not be required outside of the office context (such benzodiazepine and stimulant overuse to compensate for the unhealthy environment, after-hours “social” drinking) is widespread.
Why does corporate life so quickly devolve into competition to suffer? In truth, companies benefit little from these contests. Excellence has higher expected value than suffering. The issue is that companies don’t allow people to excel. It’s not that they flat-out forbid it, but that almost no one in a modern, so-called “lean” corporate environment has the autonomy that would make excellence even possible. R&D has been closed down, in most companies, for good. That leaves suffering as the single axis of competition. I think most people reading this know what kind of world we get out of this, and can see why it’s not acceptable.
