Microsoft has a reputation for intense competition among its workforce. Employees are rewarded in competition with their team mates. It’s a culture that has persisted from the company’s inception.
It’s understandable. Any company want to reward its best, its brightest, its most productive. But does inciting competition among fellow team members or across teams actually work? Is it the most efficient, most economical, most productive means of encouraging productivity?
David Marcum and Steven Smith think not. In their book Egonomics, subtitled What makes our ego our greatest asset (or most expensive liability), they write unequivocally, “A meta-analysis of 265 studies over fifty-six years found there was almost no task on which competitive or individualistic efforts were more effective then collaborative efforts.” Almost no task. And those where there was an advantage were simple, repetitive, physical tasks that required little thought and no cooperation.
Rewarding employees through competition seems like common sense; it also seems not to work. People don’t want to work against each other, they want to cooperate, collaborate.
A recent Google Chalk Talk titled Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dr. Dacher Keltner emphasizes the evolutionary value of compassion. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony of a Microsoft employee linking to a Google production.) Compassion and cooperation were evolutionary characteristics championed by Darwin but not popular among most philosophers and scientists. There is growing evidence, however, that cooperation is as important as competition in our evolutionary development.
What’s surprising—or not—is that a class based upon Marcum and Smith’s work on healthy ego development is one of the newest classes available on Microsoft’s campus. I suspect that as Microsoft matures, senior management are recognizing that the future success of the company depends more upon collaboration than competition.
The first post in a new blog deserves introductions. I’ve had a long life and a colorful, if eccentric, career. I’m not going to belabor the details. Suffice it to say what Jason Yormark once said of me: a life most like a novel he never wanted to read.
I’m a project manager for Microsoft’s digital advertising initiatives in the SMB (small, medium business) segment. That’s what this blog is about, the stuff that interests me in the online advertising market.
It doesn’t represent the official position of my employer, it won’t get you a lower cost per click or a higher yield on your marketing investment. But if it asks questions you also find interesting, even if the questions remain unanswered, it will have been worth the effort and worth the paper it’s printed on.
I’m not going to use this blog to advance my career. (Hell, at 59 years old, my career is what it is and not likely to change now.) I’m not going to reveal any Microsoft proprietary secrets. What I am going to to is be as honest as I can without being indiscreet. I’m going to be candid in my opinion about what matters to me professionally, not personally. (For that I have another blog.)
I expect to post erratically. I’ll post when I want, when I’m motivated, despite recommendations on how best to build an audience. I’m somewhat ambivalent about audiences. Obviously I’m interested enough to publish (albeit there’s a rather low threshold for publishing electronically) but not enough to drive circulation, not enough to flog my numbers. I care but not a lot.