Musing about Competition and Creativity
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Did you notice how many TV shows blatantly copycat each other? Listening to an interview with one of the senior Wall Street executives, I heard him blaming the current financial crisis on competitive pressures. Supposedly the thought of some banks making short-term profits by sacrificing prudent business management practices, was too difficult to resist for the rest of the financial community. Enterprise invest billions into IT every year to compete against their rivals on the basis of productivity.
Competition is the rivalry between individuals (or groups or nations) for territory or resources. It arises whenever two or more parties strive for something that all cannot obtain i.e., the rivalry of two or more parties over something.
Competition gives incentives for self improvement.
This definition implies that scarcity is at the root of competitive behavior which means that in a world of abundance there is or would be no reason to compete. So what then would provide us with incentives for self improvement?
An impartial observer may come to the conclusion that most large organizations do already exist in a world of abundance since their self improvement efforts and results are so insignificant. They also seem to be much more interested in protection from competition than in competing.
One can compete by being more efficient than the rest, i.e. doing the same thing cheaper, or by being more effective than the rest, i.e. doing the same thing better, or by being more creative, i.e. discovering new ways to do new things which make our lives better.
I believe most gains in the efficiency based competition are largely behind us as Industrial and Information revolutions leveled this field substantially. The effectiveness based competition still holds promise to bring a lot of positive change, but it also depends on how creative we prepare to become to achieve it. Regardless of your religious affiliation, from Intelligent Design to the Church of Global Warming, you have to agree that creativity is the only quality that supports a human’s claim to its unique position in the animal kingdom.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.