Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.
Some people might feel like this is an ungenerous assessment. And that’s true: most of the time, companies work together really well. Teams feel like real partners. Co-workers don’t seek out opportunities to undermine each other.
But, in many ways, cooperation is the exception to the rule of how companies are supposed to work. Capitalism, after all, is predicated upon to premise that competition reveals efficiencies. As just one example of how competition can emerge within a company (not just accidentally, but as the result of well thought out policies), consider these two examples cited in an academic paper titled “Hiring, Firing and Infighting: A Tale of Two Companies”:
In 1997, Levi Strauss & Co. was forced to lay off about a third of its workforce, when a plan to implement a team-based approach failed. The Wall Street Journal (May 20, 1998) states that this approach of the company “led to a quagmire in which skilled workers . . . found themselves pitted against slower colleagues, damaging morale and triggering corrosive infighting.”
2. Former Microsoft executive Dick Brass wrote, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times (February 4, 2010), “At Microsoft, [internal competition] has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”
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