Defining the essence of strategy as coping with competition also led to the misconception of business as a zero-sum game… Sound business is however unlike warfare or sports in that one company’s success does not require its rivals to fail… a better analogy than war or sports is performing arts… there can be many good singers or actors – each outstanding and successful in a distinctive way.

Stephen Denning – The Age of Agile: How smart companies are transforming the way work gets done

My brother was my first, and remains one of my top 3 friends. Growing up with him was fun! We did most everything together, good and bad. We played all manner of games our imagination could conjure, shared fascination with the same TV shows, comic book heroes; studied in the same schools; attended the same Sunday school classes – and made something of a splash in them if I may say so! From very early on however, I picked up from the human interactions I defined as my world and the way they reacted to each of us that he was the more likeable, handsome, funnier, outgoing, and intelligent of us both. He has a name starting with ‘’A’’, which meant alphabetically he always stood at the front of the line in his classes – my name starts with a “T’’. I was born first and, quite frequently, had to deal with being contrasted with him in a way my little mind felt to be unfair – I mean, I was not given a choice to be like he was (stud) and I picked ‘nerd’! This was a pity because I had so much going for me as well. It took me a while to figure out that this was OK – I was OK; and I eventually learnt to disregard any thoughts that his likeability meant I was unlikable or that his strengths meant I was weak. Today we have both made progress with our lives that I believe would make my dad proud, each of us with our own attributes. He’s still a stud and I’m a nerd (I guess) yet I am extremely proud of him (and, apparently with age, more handsome… 😊) and have joined with full zest that world of human interactions that celebrates him in all his studness.

Competition is generally premised on the assumption that there is too little of a resource to go around multiple interested parties: many runners one medal, many players one trophy, many businesses one customer, etc. From our childhood we are conditioned to compete for these ‘limited’ resources. Our history and culture celebrate the extraordinary feats of top-class “competitors” that out run a field, jump the highest, throw the furthest, swim the fastest, vanquish that military foe, top that high school senior year, score that hail-mary touchdown, emerge that number one company, name it! We are conditioned to want nothing less than number one. One of the more prominent strategy development models for businesses, Michael Porter’s 5 forces model, espoused this perception in one of the expressed aims of a business according to him: to position itself in a location where the 5 forces are least operative in order to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage. Minds more able than mine have devoted themselves to the critique of this model and I feel comfortable leaving it to them to share their thoughts – I recommend the Age of Agile that I have quoted in my intro as a good starting reference for this.

The thing about this perspective on competition is that, first, it requires that the business and its survival be the center of the universe, not the delivery of a proposition that meets the customer’s real needs. Second, the assumption on which its premised – scarcity – is often upended with some new discovery in technology, business models, customer need, shift in demographic or social convention, change in regulations, climate, passing generations, and on it goes. Several writers I have been reading lately all tend to agree that scarcity reflects the limit of imagination. Once new possibilities are considered, the conversation switches to one of abundant possibility. Until fracking emerged as a viable technology for mining oil, the world was awash with predictions of peak oil, with projections indicating we would soon be exhausting its recoverable reserves of oil. The music industry in much of western Europe and the United States was facing threatening decline in album sales until we cracked streaming. Many more recent trends are showing great potential to re-order what work will look like, what our meals shall be like (and how we shall grow their ingredients); how we communicate, debate, vote, meet and fall in love; what and how we manufacture (3D printing, advanced robotics, new materials); how we shall travel (autonomous vehicles). The possibilities have barely been tapped.

With abundance, rather than competition there is collaboration across networks, a leveraging of strengths of those besides yourself to solve a need you have identified with your customer. There is less sabotage, less suspicion and mistrust, more value on the table for the wider market. My growth no longer must come at the expense of your loss; as a matter of fact, handing you a gain may be just what I need to gain as well. Further, it can be very difficult and extremely exhausting if you are focused on a competition to factor all the possible events that could alter the competitive landscape to your disadvantage and develop a strategy to respond to this – especially the landscape we ‘millennials’ have come to be accustomed to: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, always in flux. In this reality, it may benefit us to collaborate more than compete – what I cannot do by myself to adjust to the environment, an association of like-minded enterprises may better prevail.

There is merit to raising other factors, primarily the joy of your customer, above competition as a driving factor in charting the course of your enterprise and exploring the opportunities this provides you with regards to developing new solutions, value delivery models, collaborations. You could be the one that leads others into that place of abundance just like Apple did with the iPhone. How’s that for an alluring possibility?