Ecological Literacy LO14059

Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)
Mon, 23 Jun 1997 20:16:04 -0700 (PDT)

Replying to LO14037 --

On Mon, 23 Jun 1997 CliffRH@aol.com wrote:

> Natural systems, their living members - and living organizations - have a
> predisposition to sustain themselves. They do this by evolving toward
> those approaches that require least expenditure of energy to survive
> and/or reproduce (or otherwise sustain their own existence). They evolve
> away from competitive situations to seek niches where they can survive and
> renew with minimal expenditure of effort or energy, even if that means
> changing or evolving to do it. In the business world, we speak of
> becoming "more competitive" but in virtually every situation, what we
> really mean is developing our products or services in ways that reduce the
> wasteful effort of going head to head with someone else for the same
> resources or customers. We evolve away from direct competition but often
> define our shift as "becoming more competitive," which leads to
> misunderstanding what is really taking place.

A good illustration of this was what happened to GM and Ford in the 1980s.
GM spent close to a billion dollars on buying what turned out to be
pre-alpha-test robotics. Its executives confided that one of the reasons
they did this was that Ford was having financial problems at the time, and
they hoped to make Ford cripple itself by spending an equal amount to
catch up with GM. But Ford chose not to play the game; it invested in
low-tech, relatively inexpensive process improvements and came up with the
Ford Taurus at the same time GM came up with the Cadillac Allante.

As Alfie Kohn points out in _No Contest_, Americans have come to view the
purpose of competition as making bad things happen to one's "opponents"
rather than making good things happen to oneself. Part of the problem is
that a lot of Americans think that the goal of capitalism is for the
"strongest" companies to wipe out their competition and become monopolies,
but this is the exact opposite of what Adam Smith had in mind.

-- 

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>