Getting over competition
Popular economic development wisdom has it that we’re supposed to compete against other regions. For things like jobs for the locally disengaged. Those of us who travel the country to build capacity see each region as worthy of whatever grace and good fortune should visit.
We need to get over the Neanderthal notion of competition. How about if we help every region support organizations that are smart enough to engage the unengaged? Why do we have to gain at someone else’s expense? What if we took an abundance perspective for once? What if we got together with other regions and co-created the best outcome for everyone.
As soon as we let go of fear, every good becomes clear.
May 29th, 2007 09:24
I believe that a basic tenet of the knowledge economy, what the Tofflers call the Third Wave, is that we live in a world of infinite abundance. Thinking about competition and zero-sum games is getting to be some really negative activity; I’m thinking it’s something that really can hold us all back.
May 29th, 2007 21:40
And hold us back, it does, Tim. We need to be having conversations about the possibility of creating jobs rather than competing for jobs, creating brains instead of competing for brains. Competition at basic levels commoditizes everything, which is fine in agrarian and industrial paradigms. In an open source knowledge ecology? It doesn’t translate. It’s transcending plumbing and electrical metaphors for spiritual metaphors.