Competition: For Better Or For Worse
- Abhishek Sinha
Batch 2005-07, T.A.
Pai Management Institute, Manipal
We all run, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. When we run with others, we feel the need to surge ahead and lead, and because we all feel the need, and strive to fulfill it, we have something amongst us which we label as competition.
“Competition”, a
word very commonly used, misused and often abused. And a word whose meaning
most of us are not very aware of. Do we just talk of
The individual, the firm, and to an
extent even nature and the world, are governed primarily by the nature of the
competition around them. These are just a very neat hierarchy of the forms of
competition in the world. In his article ‘Competition is more than a Scramble’ Prof. Sankaran’s talks of the seat fighting
characterized Indian train journey being a misleading conditioning of the
mindset. I believe that this small daily portion of our lives, to try to get
the best seat, to keep the luggage in the safest place, might just prove to be
a symbolic pointer to our healthy and rational competition at higher levels.
Isn’t the ambition to secure top honors at a sports meet akin to and a higher
version of the want of securing the best seat on a train? Isn’t this
competitive spirit on the train the same fire that motivates the same person to
“reach out for the skies” in the job that he/she partakes? Then why not use the
symbolic competitive spirit from the grass root levels to analyze, understand
and constructively utilize competition at the highest levels?
We must first understand that
competition does not necessarily have fixed positive or negative connotations.
The National Geographic Xpeditions website says in its children’s tutorial of
Olympic Games: “Competition can be
good, as when people or teams play games against each other and stick to the
rules. It can also be bad, such as when two people fight or when someone tries to
cheat at a game.” And this simple demarcation of good and bad competition
perhaps helps us draw and focus on the line that separates the right from the
wrong in the world of competition. This perhaps is the ethical thumb rule of
competition in all phases of life.
And when it
comes to the competitive markets of companies and firms, we realize that supply
and demand both play equally pivotal roles in determining the nature of
competition amongst such big players. Healthy suppliers are required and to
“keep them on their toes” are required the buyers. Once the healthy suppliers
are in place they would, as Professor Sankaran (2005) points out, “seek out other combatants
who are alive and healthy with whom they enter into a social contract without
value-reducing hit-and-run guerrilla warfare (or, at the other extreme,
cartelization).” They would also elbow out the bad suppliers and filter them
form entering into the stage. And hence the competition would remain within
fair and healthy suppliers completely regulated by the buyers, giving rise to
the perfectly competitive market.
Whether it is the individual, the
train journey, or the corporate market, competition is not just an eventuality,
it is a necessity. As my fellow passenger on the train had once remarked, “I’d rather come early and take the window
seat than sulk throughout the journey about how the person sitting at the
window does not deserve to be sitting there.”
“All
the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” The stage
and the show wouldn’t be half as interesting if there were not to be some
healthy competition amongst the players!!
References:
http://autonomysan.blogspot.com/. Accessed September 7, 2005.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/17/gk2/olympic.html.
Accessed September 7, 2005.