The end of the gladiators
There is one thing any good business person knows--if you want to be successful, you better be prepared to CRUSH your competitors. On the competitive battlefield we are gladiators. We arm ourselves with maces, shields and swords. We are rivals, not friends. There will be, after all, only one winner.
I have, over the years, become used to these ways of thinking of competition. It might come from my years in strategy consulting. I mean, Micheal Porter's On Competition is sitting on my desk right now. I think when Porter is your desk reference you are pretty at home with the competitive concept. I am not, however, some hard-nosed businesswoman that is ready to crush her competitors at all costs. I admit it, I am a soft heart. When the big drug store chain comes in and puts that little family pharmacy out of business I am really bummed. I get it that that is how things work in the business world, but come on...do they really have to do that?
So, I guess what I am saying is that I have become accustomed to these things, but I have never felt good about them. It is a way of doing business, but is it really the only way?
In my work, I am lucky in that I get to talk to lots of nonprofit executive directors. I get to hear about their organizational challenges and about the creative and effective ways they overcome them. When I ask executive directors what they think about competitors and how they deal with them, I find that they often do not think of nonprofits offering similar services as competitors at all. They say things like, "We really are all working together" or "We are not incompetition. We collaborate with other nonprofits; we do not compete." I was puzzled by this at first and I almost thought it was a veil they were hiding behind because they did not like words like "competition" or "rivals."
As I think about the issue more and spend even more time talking to nonprofit leaders, I realize that they really do look at things this way. Many nonprofits see themselves as stewards to their organization's mission. A steward is a conscientious caretaker of the mission, but the mission really belongs to the community it serves. Think about it like this, the mission belonging to the community it serves and the nonprofit's primary goal being to make sure that the mission is realized. It is not about any particular nonprofit's success or ability to stay in "business"; it is about the mission living on in the community.
This means that whatever best serves to push forward a mission, you do it. That can mean entering into a collaborative relationship or even giving way to your more effective competitor (gasp!) and closing your doors.
This undermines the whole premise of competition because competition is all about keeping your business regardless of who comes on the scene. I like this idea of mission stewardship because it means nonprofits put their communities first, even if it means they have to close their doors. Now I have a new book on my desk, Brinckerhoff's new book: Nonprofit Stewardship: A Better Way to Lead Your Mission-Based Organization. Porter is moving towards the bottom of the pile.
