According to Rupert Murdoch, “Competition is enjoyable. It’s the reason for being in business.” That’s one side of the debate. The other school of thought says that competition is a bad thing – at least when it occurs between peers working within the same company. Unchecked, competition can make people feel worse about themselves and their coworkers. And, while it may drive productivity up in the short run, too much comparison quickly leads to burnout. As one technology forecaster says, “Focus on competition


has always been a formula for mediocrity.” Or, as Mary Kay Ash discovered, when everybody – instead of just the top perOr,


Or as Mary Kay Ash discovered, when everybody – instead of just the top performers – wins something, competition takes on a whole different aspect. When she started her own company, she decided there wouldn’t be just a few winners; everyone would win something at some level so competition had no negative consequences. But, whether you see it as a good thing or a bad thing, everyone agrees on one point: competition is inevitable. It’s built into our collective DNA – as anyone who’s ever watched toddlers at play can attest – and naturalists going back all the way to Charles Darwin have concluded that humans are instinctively competitive. Which leads us to the bigger questions: Is there a good way and a bad way to compete? Do some kinds of competition bring out the best in the human spirit while other kinds bring out the worst? The best kinds of competition – the kinds that make workers eager to participate and propel them to long- lasting levels of higher achievement – have two things in common: They’re fun.


They serve a higher purpose.


Perhaps no one knows as much about play as company founders in the youth-driven technology sector. One of them says, “On the outside, we’re a fun and irreverent place; but, on the inside, we are extremely competitive.” This company hosts game days, relay races, blog contests – an endless series of competitions disguised as games,


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each designed to inspire a generation of workers who have grown up with joysticks in their hands. One year, hundreds of cool gadgets were demonstrated


before a live audience, with the winner determined by an applause-o-meter. Top honors went to a wireless memory card that gave users a cable-free way to move photos from their cameras to their computers. But, when it comes to treating competition as a game, nothing tops the daddy of all competitions, the X PRIZE Foundation Awards, which also meets the second criteria of using competition for the greater good. The nonprofit X PRIZE Foundation manages “public competitions to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of human- ity” – a lofty mission designed to drive innovators to solve challenges facing the world. This is the ultimate big-picture objective, since the X PRIZE Foundation tackles problems – environmental, financial, medical, and social – that influence the world in a global sense. Its statement reads, “We believe that a small group of people with passion for a cause can achieve cross-disciplinary innovation breakthroughs that benefit us all.” The competitions are high profile, the goals are grand, and the prizes are worth millions of dollars. But the idea isn’t new. The X PRIZE is modeled after the Orteig Prize, which offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. The winner? Charles Lindbergh, of course, in 1927 – and the world was changed


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