Of steaks and lions
There’s an old saying about throwing steaks to lions in the hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Apparently, if you do it long enough, the lion eventually grows old, loses his teeth, and gums the steak to death. But they’ll at least consider vegetables at that point.
The current political dance in the Senate is a rather interesting example of lions and steaks. We have a minority party that has found that the best way to succeed is to do everything possible to prevent the majority from accomplishing anything. The majority keeps throwing them steaks and hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Why? Well, let’s look at this as if it were a corporate boardroom and see what lessons can be learned.
Now, to be fair, most businesses don’t have 100 vice-presidents. However, they have enough. I regularly hear tales of businesses (sorry, I can’t name names) with small coalitions competing with or refusing to cooperate with the majority. In each case, the minority players are working to make the majority look bad. Why? To gain the favor of the CEO, and hence to accrue more personal power to themselves. It seems more than a little silly, since it doesn’t do the company any good: even if the minority is right in their ideas, the cost of the infighting does more to hurt the company than any benefit that the minority’s policies would have brought. And when the minority’s policies are wrong, the damage is even greater.
Unfortunately, what has happened is that the minority coalition has lost track of the goals of the company: they are focused on their own goals, which usually involve succession to the CEO position, a larger scope of authority, bigger pay packages, and so forth. The reasons are as varied as the companies. Sometimes the minority coalition fails and is fired by the CEO or the Board. Sometimes they succeed, and the majority is fired.
What determines the result of the struggle is how the majority handles the competition. If they try to be nice and refuse to compete back, the minority is only encouraged. If they are so afraid of looking bad that they refuse to compete, they just end up looking bad. It’s only when the majority demonstrates that they are willing to play the same game, and compete as viciously as the minority that the game changes. Quite simply, in every group in which competition arises, the only way to end that competition is for the majority to demonstrate that the cost of competition is greater than the cost of cooperation and the rewards of cooperation are greater than the rewards for competition.
It doesn’t much matter if we’re talking about IBM or the US Senate. So long as we’re dealing with people, the dynamics are the same. Only the scenery changes.
