“It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail” is a line attributed to Genghis Khan and sometimes quoted by the moguls of our own era. In the cutthroat, hypercompetitive business world today, what is your take on this attitude?
It’s nonsense, of course, because it’s just not the way business usually works, or should. Obviously, you’re not going to sit around wishing your competitors well. All tough-minded businesspeople want to win—they want the most sales, the biggest market share, the highest profit margins, and so on.
But tough-minded businesspeople also realize that competitors, for all their aggravation, serve a purpose. They sharpen your focus. They keep you fierce and hungry. And the best of them raise the bar on every aspect of performance, from innovation to delivery.
Without competition, companies usually get fat and lazy. Case in point: all the bureaucratic monopolies out there that have foundered largely because of the self-satisfaction and arrogance that came with the very success they sought.
Look, you may not want your competitors to win, but unlike Genghis, you want them around. It’s good for customers, it’s good for you (albeit sometimes painful), and it’s good for business overall.
Now take the quote to the individual level: wrong again, even for the most ambitious among us. We’re not going to deny, of course, that schadenfreude exists: It’s human nature to feel a twinge of happiness when a colleague screws up. But the most successful people .ght that instinct with everything in them. They know that if someone else’s candle goes out, as the old saying goes, theirs doesn’t burn any brighter. It just makes the whole room darker.
As with tough competitors, you learn from your colleagues and improve because of them. When they do well, so do you, either by their example or by being part of their team. Maybe Mr. Khan was on to something when he was fighting warlords with spears and clubs on the plains of Mongolia. But for today’s world, his advice seems about 750 years out of date.
This question and answer originally appeared in Business Week magazine on May 29, 2006.
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