The history of innovation is full of rivalries - some friendly, some less so - where creative people challenged each other, egged each other on and ultimately pushed each other on to triumphs that otherwise would not have been possible. Think of the scramble to decode DNA in Watson's The Double Helix.1 Think of the competition among the Renaissance painters. Think of the exploration of North America and the race to the moon. Yet, within corporations, it is often considered impolite to have even a friendly rivalry. Such behavior may be seen as anti-team, egotistical and disruptive. When a creative person is driven to say “I'm better than you are” and then to prove it, that's immature. There is a double standard in most cases. Somehow, this corporate polity is absent when salespeople are involved. When quarterly results are in play, corporations often encourage the creation of winners and losers in the coarsest terms. But innovators, though sometimes motivated by the successes of marketplace rivals, tend to work in an atmosphere that resembles the world of the aristocratic amateur, with something approaching disdain for conflict. This makes little practical sense. Conflict is healthy, and innovation thrives on conflict. In fact, it is difficult to imagine doing anything that really matters without risk, failure, stress and the ruffling of feathers. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” To read the full report, download the PDF file at the top of this page. 1 Watson, James D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. Simon & Shuster, Inc. 1968, 1996. |
