Phony Games

There are lots of phony corporate games played at work. Perhaps the worst of them is the game of “competition”.

It happens in law firms, sales jobs, and almost everywhere else.

For some reason, we have all been led into thinking that beating someone else motivates people more than… doing well. Or doing work we’re proud of.

No matter how harmful and stupid, executive “leaders” seem to get away with terrible work cultures all in service of “competition”.

It starts in school. I’m learning that in America at least, schools are pit against each other. District against district. The very existence of teachers, schools, etc hang in the balance.

We’re taught that for one company (or country) to succeed, another must fail. Something disputed repeatedly by Nobel Prize winning economists.

Why do we accept this Squid Game like zero-sum way of thinking?

It seems like people care more about how their kid’s school is doing compared to other schools. As if that’s a marker for the quality of education.

We are taught that we need to compete with one another to “win”. But research repeatedly shows that the pie gets bigger for everyone when we focus on cooperation instead of competition.

At work, teams are pit against each other. Within teams, people are put against each other.

All in the mistaken notion that people do best when they have to “beat” someone else.

I saw this in law practices where the draw of the almighty billable hour made people burn out. Competition didn’t help.

Sales has insanely high attrition rates. Let’s stop pretending that the cost of hiring/retaining sales teams is lower than the revenue you get.

All this is based on some artificial scarcity.

Research shows that cooperation works better across the board. But all this talk about competition certainly helps us vie upwards for the approval of the overlords.

Which might be exactly the reason why this game continues to persist.