A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition
Margaret Heffernan
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 1610392914
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Get into the best schools. Land your next big promotion. Dress for success. Run faster. Play tougher. Work harder. Keep score. And whatever you do—make sure you win.
Competition runs through every aspect of our lives today. From the cubicle to the race track, in business and love, religion and science, what matters now is to be the biggest, fastest, meanest, toughest, richest.
The upshot of all these contests? As Margaret Heffernan shows in this eye-opening book, competition regularly backfires, producing an explosion of cheating, corruption, inequality, and risk. The demolition derby of modern life has damaged our ability to work together.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. CEOs, scientists, engineers, investors, and inventors around the world are pioneering better ways to create great products, build enduring businesses, and grow relationships. Their secret? Generosity. Trust. Time. Theater. From the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts to the classrooms of Singapore and Finland, from tiny start-ups to global engineering firms and beloved American organizations—like Ocean Spray, Eileen Fisher, Gore, and Boston Scientific—Heffernan discovers ways of living and working that foster creativity, spark innovation, reinforce our social fabric, and feel so much better than winning.
We can see that there is a relationship between testosterone and high degrees of competitiveness, but we don’t know why some people have higher levels of testosterone than others. This difference sheds light but doesn’t fully explain the complexity of behavior and real life outside of experiments. We will not—and should not hope to—see the day when hormone testing is used in interviews or job recruiting. As complex as it is, the science is clear on one thing: biology alone can never account fully
for dealing with sibling competition and for evoking sibling cooperation,” Sulloway writes, “are among the principal functional mechanisms that govern successful adaptation within family life.”18 Thus, differences that start out as biology are made more extreme or moderate by experience and birth order. This is both a biological process that affects the wiring in the brain (“neurosculpting”) and a strategy for protecting everyone in the family. “The concept of niches,” Sulloway argues, “derives
quite homogenous; there you get real head-to-head competition. I remember one girl, she was so accomplished and amazing, and she said to me: ‘Betsy, there are fifty just like me in high school.’ She didn’t feel unique or special. She was applying to all the same places as her friends, and she knew it was a zero-sum game: if she got in, her friends wouldn’t. If her friends got in, she wouldn’t.” Another parent, who didn’t want to be named in order to protect his daughter, told me a story about his
Miracle Brace—and he still has a full-time job making toys. But what strikes me most is how inventive he has been in his thinking about how people can work together without formal power structures. Collaborative projects can descend into compromise, conflict, or chaos, but developing a shared sense of vulnerability is a powerful starting point. Clowning together reduces distance so that sharing gets easier and differences—in disciplines and know-how—become assets. a n g ry b i rd s | 1 0 1
dog-eat-dog cultures are so vicious. At his last agency, Joe headed up a business unit that, like all the others, was responsible for its own profit-and-loss account. His unit’s profitability determined his bonus and his place within the corporate pecking order. That, he says, had all kinds of perverse consequences. “I had a really talented designer working for me,” he recalls. “But her forte was animation, and I didn’t have any animation work. One of the other teams had a great animation job,