Thinking outside the bubble

Competition is good. This is the all-pervasive paradigm modern society lives by.

The concept has been institutionalised – in our schools, workplaces and societal structures, where we jostle for grades, promotions and positions of power and influence. The assumption is that competition leads to innovation, better service, less complacency.

But what if this conventional wisdom is wrong?

What if, in creating a society where the only option is to win or lose, the pursuit of extrinsic rewards (like money, medals and prizes) ends up eclipsing our intrinsic drives – the source of true creativity?

Margaret Heffernan was in her 40s and running a software company at the height of the dotcom boom in the late 1990s when suspicion suddenly began to whisper in her ear.

“I ran software companies in Massachusetts, and my companies were part of a big conglomerate” at the same headquarters, she says. “And they all competed fiercely for the attention of the chairman.”

Heffernan is what one would call “intrinsically driven”. And she sees power struggles as an unproductive distraction from the real goal at hand. Which explains her next move: “I chose to take my company away from headquarters so that we could be on our own, because I really wanted our business to have a very open, creative culture.”

That experience made one thing clear to Heffernan: that for creativity and innovation to thrive, you need a climate of safety and freedom. Delving further, she discovered that half a century of research indicates we can’t be motivated by many things at once. And short-term rewards like money, medals and prizes crowd out the longer-term, self-generated drive.

Since then, Heffernan has become a leading critic of orthodox business leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation. Her TED talks on “wilful blindness” and daring to disagree have garnered millions of online views. 

Her latest book, “A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything And How We Do Better”, is the result of two long years of research and a lifetime of observations. And it turns everything we think we know about competition on its head.

Ever since the “father of modern economics” Adam Smith declared rational self-interest and competition were the keys to economic prosperity, the positive aspects of competition have gone almost unquestioned in capitalist societies. Heffernan’s interest in probing this assumption was sparked by an interview with a bank manager about the 2008 crash while researching for her 2011 book, “Wilful Blindness”.

“He said, ‘Look, Margaret, we didn’t like subprime. We thought subprime mortgages were horrible. But we were in a competitive place for sales people, and these things had a really high commission, so we thought we had to sell them’,” Heffernan recalls.

She thought that was interesting. Because classic economic theory says competition sparks diversity and choice. But what actually happened in banking was that competition made everybody copy each other.

“That made me think, okay, under what conditions does competition work? Under what conditions does it not work in the way we thought it did?”

Every stage of our lives today is fraught with make-or-break decisions directed towards achieving a set of narrowly defined goals.

Good grades get you the best school; the best school gets you the best university; the best university gets you the best job; and the best job – supposedly – gets you the best life, wife, family. Achieving the grade, getting the promotion, attaining the status has become the end game.

And everything in between – the thrill of learning, the satisfaction of a job well done, of working with others on a project because the project, not the credit we will get for it, is important – gets buried in a pile of desperate, anxiety-riddled rubble.

The message may sound obvious. But the examples and case studies Heffernan brings to the table in “A Bigger Prize” really bite.

She reveals the institutionalised hyper-competitiveness we live with – for instance the competitive school system where for some kids to rise to the top, many must languish at the bottom.

The problem with such systems, she argues, is that rewards are always relative – there will always be someone who has done better, achieved more: “It’s gonna be antisocial if your success depends on someone else failing.”

Her research findings actually caused her to wonder if she should proceed: “To be honest, I was kind of scared of writing the book. I thought people would think I was crazy. Saying you don’t believe in competition seems to be a lot more dangerous than saying you don’t believe in God!”

British newspaper the Observer describes Heffernan as a part of the zeitgeist that has emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crash that is “taking aim at socio-economic principles that have long appeared sacrosanct”.

Heffernan is inclined to agree. The economic crisis, she says, has made many people challenge a lot of the things capitalist societies assumed to be absolute.

 

 

 

A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything and How We Do Better

By Margaret Heffernan

Published by 

Simon & Schuster

Available at major bookshops, Bt726

Reviewed by Natalie Heng