If we follow this thought to its logical conclusion, holding your own against the competition actually means beating your competitors. ‘The winner takes it all!’
Alongside profit maximisation, this thought, too, has ripened into a guiding principle of management. ‘Competitiveness has become an article of faith, the new gospel of those sections of the population that rule today’s world.’24 In speeches, management reports and whenever reorganisation is needed, many directors and politicians chant the same old mantra of focusing on competition. The Italian sociologist, Riccardo Petrella, who made a name for himself opposing the privatisation of drinking water, notes that the cult of focusing on competition loosed itself from the context of business long ago and has already reached large sections of society. ’The imperative of competition between companies and nations has strongly moulded the thinking, strategies and decisions of education ministers, university chancellors, union leaders, members of parliament and mayors, TV producers and journalists, and continues to do so.’25
The guiding principle of focusing on competition is no doubt also the reason why the vocabulary of managers and even economists very often resembles language originally designed to describe particularly brutal events such as war and crime. In German, the struggle for a market share (‘der Kampf um Marktanteile’) sounds relatively harmless, while the English saying ‘Business is war’ is considered a dictum that describes the nature of business.26 When scouting for gifted young professionals, companies find themselves engaged in a ‘battle for talent’. In German business language, too, completely innocent sounding terms like ‘strategy’, ‘tactics’ and ‘logistics’ have crept in, which Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) originally used to describe the conflicts of war.
Bruno Wagner even gives many examples of how not only the choice of words, but also managers’ actions are reminiscent of warfare.27 The book by Matthias Weik and Marc Friedrich, in which they lambast the conduct of politics and the world of finance, bears the telling title ‘The Greatest Plundering in History’ (Der größte Raubzug der Geschichte28).
In any case, competition is combat; competition pits one party against another. The actual job of companies, however, is to do business with each other and with consumers. Companies have customers, so they do not primarily work against others, but for someone or for something. They only work against competitors secondarily. It is therefore quite astounding that focusing on competition is so highly regarded, while focusing on the customers themselves is very frequently treated with disdain, even by responsible companies. The lack of service culture in Germany is lamented on a regular basis and demonstrated by various studies, but there seem to be no long-term improvements on the horizon.
Competition is combat.
With a nod to sport, managers are fond of describing themselves as a team. There is a massive difference between a sports team and a company, however. Unlike companies, most sports teams are actually fundamentally competitive: football or handball or hockey teams are out to beat their opponents. They need an opponent for their sport to make sense.
Only a few sports, such as sailing or mountain climbing, don’t require any opponent at all, even if the occasional competition gives them an extra kick. In these sports, as in individualistic sports like running and swimming, there is a goal which has to be reached by effort. The first priority is to work towards this goal. If you are a runner or part of a sailing crew, constantly keeping an eye on your opponent requires too much energy, which could be more usefully utilised elsewhere. It’s the goal alone that matters; the opponents become a focus of attention at most only once the goal has been reached.
A company’s central goal is not to defeat others or knock them out of the race. If a runner were to knock someone out of the race in the literal sense of the word, they would be disqualified for unsporting conduct. Against this backdrop, it seems compelling to consider the fighting and attacking of competitors that is considered necessary and still widespread in many companies today as dubious. The idea of using aggressive competitive behaviour as a tactical or strategic alternative should in my opinion be consigned to the junkpile of management literature.
Above all, business activities should be characterised by the central goal of satisfying the customer.
An exaggerated focus on competition ties up resources which could be used more appropriately. Furthermore, an excessive focus on competition also blinds us to the needs of the customer.
The fact that competition turns out to be an unsuitable guiding principle for business is ultimately backed up by the findings of psychology. Psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahnemann refers to an interesting experiment in which two groups of test subjects played a game. The first group was told it was a ‘team game’; the second, that it was a ‘game of competition’. In the first case, the players were ready to help each other; in the second, they were selfish – even though both times they played the same game.29
2.4 Growth
‘Pure monetary growth is questionable.
This kind of growth is paid for by a crack through society.’
Friedhelm Hengsbach30, German Jesuit and social ethicist
The Limits to Growth is a much respected study, published in 1972, on the future of the world economy. The study was commissioned by the Club of Rome. Donella and Dennis Meadows and their collaborators at Jay Forrester’s institute for system dynamics conducted investigations and computer simulations using various scenarios.
The limits to growth
The central conclusion of the study is that if the present growth in the world population, industrialisation, environmental pollution, food production and exploitation of natural raw materials continues at its current rate, the absolute limits to growth on earth will be reached within the next hundred years.
The study was published nearly 50 years ago. Its central conclusion is still widely controversial today. The Meadows’ book has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into 30 languages. In 1973, the Club of Rome was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (the peace prize of the German publishing association) for its study.
So it is indeed surprising that business and politics today, too, are still counting on unbounded, even exponential, growth today. The ambition to grow has been taken for granted to such an extent that it is often futile to look for reasons for growth. But, there again, a reason for the ‘growth addiction’ could be hidden in the contents and structure of business studies. Business studies provides a number of ‘strategic instruments’ with which a company’s direction can be set and controlled. Hardly any of these instruments can do without the aspect of growth. Whether it is the SWOT analysis or the portfolio matrix, the balanced scorecard or the life cycle analysis, a company’s future success is predicted quite lopsidedly on the basis of quantitative potentials for growth. The result is that the company, together with purported experts who know how to skillfully visualise the ‘strategic instruments’ with colourful charts, is streamlined for the growth in volume.
The alternatives to this, on the other hand, such as consolidating or even consciously contracting, are given a passing mention in the business literature at most; in practical consulting, these alternatives often do not even crop up. These topics are obviously not ‘sexy’ enough to warrant mentioning. It is precisely these topics, however, that future managers increasingly need to think about. Recognising the limits to growth especially means making companies manoeuvrable and agile. This depends particularly on recognising – together with your employees – what opportunities are open to you, instead of following the opinions of so-called experts which always sound the same.
Alternatives to growth
With regard to growth, it is also worth bearing in mind that not every business graduate will be able to work in companies that grow. Even if the economy is growing or has to grow, as many politicians would have us believe, there will always be companies