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Coopetition

Consider two rival airlines companies. In the United States, Delta Airlines and United Airways are fierce competitors. They go head-to-head for prime time slots, routes, airport boarding gates, and, most importantly of all, customers. They are corporate giants squared off against one another in a cutthroat, high-stakes market.

However, underneath the battle we see on the surface, these two competitors are in fact cooperating with each other in many ways. When Delta and United both contract Boeing to develop a more efficient airliner, the two companies benefit by sharing in the investment, thus lowering the cost of next-generation jets for both companies. (Brandenburger & Nalebuff, 1996, p. 20, 28) Simply put, they are better at competing with each other when they cooperate with each other.

Look past the marketing and advertising: the airline industry, like every industry, is a massive interconnected web of suppliers, competitors, and partners. Airlines in direct competition with each other realize if they do not cooperate with other carriers to share airports and transit hubs, their ability to compete will essentially vanish. Of course, air carriers are just one example — wherever business transactions take place you can see some degree of cooperative coordination.

The word ‘coopetition’ has been used for a long time to describe this phenomenon in business. In 1911, an oyster packager named Kirk S. Pickett described his sales agent strategy as “co-operating with one another to develop more business for each of you. You are in co-opetition, not in competition.” (Cherington, 1913, p. 144) More recently, in 1993, Ray Noorda wrote an article arguing that businesses need to think more strategically about how they mutually cooperate while they are competing against one another. Co-opetition is a globally occurring phenomenon in business: cooperation and competition happen at the same time. (Noorda, 1993; Stein, 2010, p. 257)

I recently went to the hardware store to buy a furnace filter. As with most purchases, many options were presented. Not only could I purchase multiple filter sizes, but there were also multiple brands of each filter size to choose from. True, all the brands were in competition to sell me their product, but yet they were also cooperating: distributing their product to a central retailer, largely co-investing in same supply chain, and, of course, manufacturing standardized filter dimensions to fit my furnace. Past the first glance, competition can look and function a lot like cooperation.

Rather than deifying one and demonizing the other, examine your world beyond the categories of competition and cooperation. A city that can cooperate enough to provide enough bread for all its citizens is a city that likely has strong competition between its bakeries. Competing helps us cooperate; cooperating helps us compete. Today, as both a competitor and cooperator, take a moment and appreciate your place in the symmetry.

Originally published on the Caesura Letters. See caesuraletters.com for information on paperback, ebook, and email subscriptions.

Article

Internet and Inequality

Kevin Drum wrote an article last year in Mother Jones wherein he argued that

…the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. (Drum, 2012)

On the flip side, Ryan Avent suggests that the Internet may be an equalizer of cognitive fortitude:

The more I rely on the same cloud brain that’s available to anyone else, the less the strengths or weaknesses of my meat brain may matter. (Avent, 2012)

As we make the Internet, to what extent does the Internet makes us? Are we creating the network in our own image… is the network transforming us into its likeness? If we are going to speculate on the cognitive-equity consequences of the Internet, the question of reciprocal causation is paramount.

To highlight nature of this reciprocal evolution, consider how much our lives have changed since 1993:

So has the Internet broadened the gap between the smart and the dumb? Has it increased our overall level of cognition by equalizing and democratizing access to information? As with most human technologies, the answer seems to be: depends on the user.

As the famous little epigram goes,

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and little minds discuss people. (Mouat, 1953)

The technical contribution of the Internet is the capacity to make all types of discussions broader and more accessible. The Internet is a digital amplification of human nature. Its transformative influence on the cognitive landscape of society is inseparable from the agendas and cognition of those who leverage it.

Article

Reflecting and Broadcasting

Sometimes I wonder how our present digital landscape influences personal reflection. The ability to instantaneously broadcast a thought can quickly shift an internal dialogue from, "What does this situation really mean?" to "How am I going to fit this into a tweet?"

Does the act of contemplation and musing fundamentally change when the space between a guarded thought and a global announcement is so small?

Article

To Code is Human

Yesterday I learned how to do a media query in CSS. When I learn bits of code I am always taken aback by how the complexity of computer languages is only surpassed by its creativity. Coding, even if it appears like gibberish, is 100% human. We made this stuff up. And, like verbal language, digital script gives us the capacity to imagine ideas that were impossible to conceive before we wrote the platform to dream on.

Article

Cooperation

Thought experiment: let’s imagine that you are in charge of creating a new animal species.

Ground rules: you must play by the basic laws of life, remembering that about four-fifths of your own genetic makeup is the same as mice. (Church, et. al, 2009) In other words, you can be imaginative, but not too imaginative! Your experimental creature must be a plausible inhabitant on Earth, so it needs to follow the same processes that apply to all living things we know. Three-part DNA nucleotide codes must signify the same amino acid proteins — just as they do in you, me, goldfish, bacteria, and trees.

In order to survive, your creature must internally cooperate with itself: the genes in their genomes, the cells in their tissues — and all the innumerable subprocesses must work in conjunction with one another.

Here is another question: how will your new animal interact socially? How will it treat members of its own species? Will your species have a hierarchical society or exist in virtual isolation? Will it live in herds and packs, or solitarily, only interacting for the purpose of procreation? You must exercise a rigorous cost/benefit analysis here: in a collective herd, the ability of your species to notice (and thus escape) predators increases significantly, but living in a herd will also increase the competition for food within your species. Also, a highly cooperative clan of animals might have a lower breeding rate in order to reciprocally help nurture their young infants — but this comes at the expense of not otherwise producing more offspring. (Rubenstein & Kealey, 2012)

As in the human species, the consequence of cooperating at the collective level is often greater competition at the individual level. Whether in the microscopic, cellular domain or at the scale of behavioural interaction, cooperation and coopetition are usually causations of each other. Barely can one exist without necessitating and precipitating the other. When two animals fight over the right to mate, their vicious competition results in improving the strength of the herd. Conversely, when the employees of a business firm effectively cooperate with one another, they tend to out-perform their competition. A highly competitive sports team is marked by high levels of teamwork and cooperation. Cooperation and competition are inseparable: they make each other happen.

Whether it was the formation of your own genetic identity at conception, or the capacity of one business to rise above another company, or even the survival rate of your imaginative species, one remarkable observation bears noting: the better we tend to be at cooperating, the better we tend to be at competing, and vice versa.

As individuals, we seem disposed to emphasize (and moralize) one above the other. On the left, in praise of interdependency, we deem that cooperation is superior to competition. On the right, in praise of fairness, we deem that competition is superior to cooperation.

Today, how will you merge the coequally imperative goals of interdependent cooperation and fair competition?

(This post was originally published in the Caesura Letters.)

Article

The Circle of Biogeochemical Life

I tried singing Elton John’s Circle of Life (from The Lion King) and replacing the first line of the chorus with, ‘It’s the biogeochemical circle of life’. Clearly this adds far too many extra syllables. (Note to self: do not try as a karaoke trick.) This is unfortunate, really, because there is a clearly a rather strong empirical foundation underlying the basic premise of the song.