Competitiveness - is it enough to survive?
“I sometimes allowed my competitiveness to get in the way of my integrity”Quote from Australian Sportsperson
We often hear business leaders say “in order to remain competitive, we must ...”
Competitiveness, as an outcome, is perhaps the lowest of all possible goals, the business equivalent of the human goal of survival. It is an essential foundation on which to build, not a final goal to be achieved. There are times when this is all we can do, but these are usually times we hate. The need for competitiveness may instil a sense of urgency, but it is hardly calculated to create an environment for sustainable success.
We tend to relate competition to the cost of our products or services to consumers (blame our basic economics lessons at school for this!), so these announcements often continue with the outline of job losses, the introduction of new technology, the replacement of suppliers, or other actions that will lead to lower costs.
More advanced business leaders relate competition to the value received by the customer compared to the costs they face, and achieving better results for their customers.
Competition is a learning and growth experience. By competing, we learn from those with similar values and goals, including our customers and competitors, and find inspiration and methods to improve our own performance.
It is also one of many learning and growth experiences. Like survival itself, it is not the only experience we will ever have, but one of many.
By focusing on “competitiveness” as either the sole driver or the primary driver of a business, we set a very low bar and usually create extremely limited avenues for success.
Eating food is required for human survival, but it is the experiences we get from eating that lead to growth and success. Tasting food, exploring the many options available, experiencing the variety of tastes, creating new and better tastes, establishing diets for health and wellbeing, finding ways to feed those with less access to food, growing crops in places they’ve never been grow before, creating lifestyle foods to meet the needs of people with busy lives – all of these examples led to business opportunities, and some of them changed ways of life in countries around the world.
Many business people treat competitiveness as the “magic bullet” and the core of business, but even magic bullets can kill.
Don’t use competitiveness as your primary or sole driver – that way lies stagnation and eventual death.