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A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition Hardcover – April 8, 2014
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Get into the best schools. Land your next big promotion. Dress for success. Run faster. Play tougher. Work harder. Keep score. And whatever you do -- make sure you win.
Competition runs through every aspect of our lives today. From the cubicle to the race track, in business and love, religion and science, what matters now is to be the biggest, fastest, meanest, toughest, richest.
The upshot of all these contests? As Margaret Heffernan shows in this eye-opening book, competition regularly backfires, producing an explosion of cheating, corruption, inequality, and risk. The demolition derby of modern life has damaged our ability to work together.
But it doesn't have to be this way. CEOs, scientists, engineers, investors, and inventors around the world are pioneering better ways to create great products, build enduring businesses, and grow relationships. Their secret? Generosity. Trust. Time. Theater. From the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts to the classrooms of Singapore and Finland, from tiny start-ups to global engineering firms and beloved American organizations -- like Ocean Spray, Eileen Fisher, Gore, and Boston Scientific -- Heffernan discovers ways of living and working that foster creativity, spark innovation, reinforce our social fabric, and feel so much better than winning.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPublicAffairs
- Publication dateApril 8, 2014
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-101610392914
- ISBN-13978-1610392914
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"In this bold sociology of organizations, Heffernan sets her sights on an issue that cuts across industries, nations, and individuals: Why is our obsession with winning not only failing to deliver the benefits we expect, but leaving us ill equipped to solve the problems competition creates?..."A Bigger Prize" is an important call to build more collaborative, trustworthy and enduring institutions." New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Visit mheffernan.com or follow Margaret on Twitter @M_Heffernan
Product details
- Publisher : PublicAffairs (April 8, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1610392914
- ISBN-13 : 978-1610392914
- Item Weight : 1.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,940,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
MARGARET HEFFERNAN is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University. She worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas. As a television producer, she made documentary films for Timewatch, Arena, and Newsnight. She was one of the producers of Out of the Doll's House, the prize-winning documentary series about the history of women in the twentieth century. She designed and executive produced a thirteen part series on The French Revolution for the BBC and A&E. The series featured, among others, Alan Rickman, Alfred Molina, Janet Suzman, Simon Callow and Jim Broadbent and introduced both historian Simon Schama and playwright Peter Barnes to British television. She also produced music videos with Virgin Records and the London Chamber Orchestra to raise attention and funds for Unicef's Lebanese fund.
Leaving the BBC, she ran the trade association IPPA, which represented the interests of independent film and television producers and was once described by the Financial Times as "the most formidable lobbying organization in England."
In 1994, she returned to the United States where she worked on public affair campaigns in Massachusetts and with software companies trying to break into multimedia. She developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors and The Learning Company. She then joined CMGI where she ran, bought and sold leading Internet businesses, serving as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She was named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter in 1999, one of the Top 25 by Streaming Media magazine and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter. Her "Tear Down the Wall" campaign against AOL won the 2001 Silver SABRE award for public relations.
In 2004, Margaret published THE NAKED TRUTH: A Working Woman's Manifesto about Business and What Really Matters (Jossey-Bass) and in 2007 she brought out WOMEN ON TOP: How Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules for Business Success. She is Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Simmons College in Boston and Executive in Residence at Babson College. She sits on the Council of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the UK as well as one the boards of several private companies. Margaret blogs for the Huffington Post and BNET and writes for magazines around the world. She was recently featured on television in The Secret Millionaire and on radio in Changing the Rules. She has written three plays for the BBC and is just starting her fourth. She is married with two children.
WHY WILFUL BLINDNESS?
As the banks were melting down, I kept wondering: Why did no one see this coming? I could see it, many people around me could see it. That the world was running on debt was plain to many people. So why were we so surprised? And then I thought: this feeling is familiar. That sensation of knowing something and not knowing something. Skeletons in cupboards. Emperors new clothes. The elephant in the room. The idea that you're safe as long as you don't recognize the one thing that truly threatens you. I'd seen it in people who smoked and knew they shouldn't, others who never opened their credit card bills, in marriages where you knew one of them was having an affair. And I suddenly realized: that's what it is. In some walk of life, we are all wilfully blind. And I started to wonder: How exactly does that work....?
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have pervaded our daily lives at huge cost, and that's not financial cost.
The material in this book will ring familiar to those undertaking teacher's education in the past five years or so (remember your developmental and educational psychology courses?), and also to those who have read about the reasons for peaceful or nonviolent parenting.
The chapters are fairly discrete—each deals with different industries and institutions, but they are analyzed toward the theme of understanding the differences between cooperatist versus competitive achievement structures to great effect. The writing is active and interesting, and even though I found myself wanting more from the chapters dealing with topics with which I am familiar, it was not an unsatisfied wanting. Rather, I found my interest in these topics expanding in cool new directions that make me want to return to those topics for a different taste. The topics I am unfamiliar with remained highly interesting, as well, which surprised me because I had an internal groan when I was embarking reading about something I thought I wouldn't be interested in (I know—not very enlightened of me). I'm glad I persisted, though. None of the chapters failed to stimulate or increase understanding.
Because the book deals with so many different industries, I would recommend this for just about everyone—you can take the topic of beneficial versus harmful human social arrangements and abstract it across pretty much everything that brings humans together. And though the book is fairly light on solutions, I think it solidly adds to the literature supporting greater, more optimistic cooperation among humans. Nor is the fact that the book is light on solutions a terrible mark against it, as I think that the new direction it supports has not quite yet been witnessed on earth, and we have only our imaginations to guide us to the best, and then better, and then better, ad infinitum, structures and arrangements. Improvement is a process, and this book helps redirect at the margins to better processes.
Enjoy!
A Bigger Prize. How we can do better than the competition. Margaret Heffernan. 2014. ISBN 9780385679831. The author, after some very thoughtful , thorough research, has put together a well written, concise book that shows how competition is not the be all and end all of moving forward. All to quickly much of society is moving toward a belief that in order fo an individual to get ahead someone else has to lose - the zero sum game.She pretty well slams the counterproductive effects of competition on :
education
sports
academia
research
financial services
software
music
movies
drug discovery
subprime debt
and more
What makes her arguments so compelling is that we have all seen exactly what she is pointing out and that if we allow this win at all cost approach to continue we will all be worse off. Not so say reading this will cause you to become a card carrying Occupy Wallstreet member, but unfettered capitalism /competition (in order for me to get ahead, you have to lose) is taking us down the wrong road. What hit me the hardest is my current research on human development and innovation is pointing to similar conclusions as this author. If you are any kind of leader, coach, educator this is one book you must read.