The man was an important man on this island – and he used expansive language full of war-like metaphors. “Il faut se battre jusqu’au bout,” he emphasized, “we need to fight to the last bit. We need to form alliances, resist, strategize, fight back and overcome. We have to teach them a lesson – or we are dead!” The board members listening to him were silent – but you could see that they agreed with the words of their leader. After all, this was the third contract that they were about to lose – this time to their Bangladesh competition.

A lot that has been written about how doing business on this island and throughout the world in general, can be likened to waging a war. Many years ago, when my ex-boss retired from a large Durban-based organisation, we thought of nothing when offering him Sun-tzu’s famous “The Art of War” as a reminder of his belligerent managerial style. Were we right? Is business the same as war? Is going after a larger market share, pricing below the competition, advertising aggressively and so on, the same as winning over the battlefields? Are we right when we talk about “shooting down the competition” or “having no mercy” when attempting to motivate our sales staff? Is all this hostility really necessary?

I don’t think so. I know of no useful business goal that a hostile attitude toward the competition has managed to achieve. Our competition is not our enemy – wise leaders know instinctively that a competitor helps to create a need and focus the market. For example, we were the first on this island to set up and operate a “business school”. Should we be concerned that others are now copying us and eating at our market share? Should we go and wage an all-out war against them? No – they are helping us to spread positive messages about the need to make tertiary education more accessible to all. Together, we can get the government to change some of the existing laws, create new ones, ensure high standards, and so on. You’ll find no talks of war in our corridors.

Go deeper - what lies underneath all this talk of war? Is it blind, unchecked adherence to the concept that our competition “is” our enemy and it is therefore “normal” to want to “annihilate” them? Is it because of the infernal comparison process that we are all brought up from day one e.g. “Look at your brother – he is much better than you” or “Why don’t you become like Mary – she is not only the Head Girl but she always comes first in the class?” Is it because we are afraid – we fear what the competition will do to us and therefore we need to boost our troops’ morale in the same way as American Indians used to dance around their fires before striking out at their enemies? Is it because we don’t know who we are and therefore require “enemies” against whom we can compare ourselves?

This talk of war, in my opinion, is both futile and dangerous. Even if it succeeds and if we manage to root out the competition, all we would have achieved is to create yet more conflict in a world already ravaged by strife and struggle. By urging our employees to celebrate the misfortunes of our competitors and rejoice in their demise, all we would have accomplished is creating doubts about our industry itself – doubts that will nag our shareholders, future investors, customers or own employees. No decent manager, irrespective of his or her background or position should rejoice when a competitor fails – having experienced it years ago and knowing how much misery resulted, I can assure you that there is always more at stake than the satisfaction of our own petty interests.

I believe that we should instead conduct our business with civility and courtesy and wish others around us well. I believe that we should concentrate on doing the best that we can and leave it to the market to decide who are the winners and the losers – if there are indeed such terms. In so doing, who knows, we may even succeed in creating a better society and ultimately, a world where fear and conflict have ceased to exist.

<B>Prof E. Charoux

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