Every other week or so my spouse and I meet with some friends for dinner and conversation, usually at a favorite Chinese restaurant where we enjoy stimulating banter over excellent cuisine. An evening’s dinner conversation recently turned to the matter of competition and how it really works in business and other areas of human activity. Part of the context of this conversation was my previous blog about the Finnish school system, and how they do not have a policy of competition among schools based on test scores.

Competition in America is like a holy sacrament to hear most people praise it’s virtues, particularly its ability to drive innovation. I made a comment to the effect that competition as such does not promote innovation. Instead, the true dynamic of competition is to imitate. The others at the table agreed furiously with me, and I was treated to some remarkable first-hand stories of how companies they worked for actually shunned new projects unless some other company was doing something similar.

Let’s get this out in the open once and for all: American business hates competition. The zero-sum game where you out perform your competitor is done only if you can buy them or sue them out of existence. The object of competition in American business is to eliminate the competition. Anyone who has looked at the history of Microsoft knows how much they venerate competition; remember FullWrite Professional, anyone? Or any number of other innovative companies whose products, often whose very existence came to an end when they had the misfortune to be noticed by Microsoft? The larger and more powerful the company, the less tolerance you find for competition.

It surprises me that the misuse of competition survives in education as much as it does. A good friend of mine, a physicist, told me of how the physics department at Berkeley (of all places) had a policy that only a set number of students would graduate, irregardless of how well they did in their classes. Stop and think about that for a moment, and consider how many perfectly competent physicists were denied graduation because of an arbitrary and thoroughly moronic department policy. How much innovation has that single policy cost the world, to say nothing of the personal cost to the students who failed to meet what surely was a capricious standard?

One of the best studies I have ever seen on the nature of competition is a book by Alfie Kohn called No Contest: the Case Against Competetion. It appears to be still in print even though it was printed in 1992. It’s worth snagging and studying a copy of this extremely thought-provoking book.

Kohn’s point (one among many) is that when your success depends on someone elses failure the process of whatever you are trying to do is degraded. This is not just some simpering “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” mantra, it is the result of observing the effects of competition versus cooperation in everyday activities. Kohn clearly demonstrates that especially in education students consistently do better in non-competitive learning environments. One of my favorite examples was a class where everybody’s final exam grade would be the same because it would be the average grade of the entire class. Suddenly, the success of your neighbor was tied to your success. Smart kids started helping the slower ones. Study groups formed out of nowhere. Most interesting of all, student got consistently higher grades in classes using this idea than the usual “my-success-demands-your-failure” model.

Someone at this point will usually invoke the Law of the Jungle, or “Survival of the fittest” a phrase coined not by the biologist Darwin, but an economist, Spencer. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is supposed to be the norm, but when you spend lots of time in nature, you find that predation or avoiding same is not the constant activity of every animate creature. I would be willing to bet that symbiosis is at least as prevalent in nature as predation.

I find that for the independent scholar competition is pointless and a waste of time. The result is manufactured controversies, pointless “intellectual” rivalries. Think Fox News in a teacup. In fact, I know very few serious independent scholars who indulge in such nonsense, and they seldom produce anything of real interest or insight.

A false alternative to competition is to cooperate. While admirable or desirable, it isn’t the only option. You can always find your own hill to be king of. You can innovate, truly innovate. Do what will truly bring something new and interesting into the world without hanging on every press release or rumor from your so-called competitors. Look at it this way: if you don’t try to compete (i.e., imitate) with the rest, you may find yourself with something no one else has. In other words, you’ll have a monopoly… until someone starts imitating you.