[Ideas] Margaret Heffernan: Competition Isn't Everything

The Olympics. X-Factor. The Nobel Prize. Everywhere you look: competition – for fame, money, attention, status. Being top seems to be everything – but what is it costing all of us? We depend on competition and expect it to identify the best, make complicated decisions easy and to motivate the lazy and inspire the dreamers. But Margaret Heffernan shows that competition regularly produces just what we don’t want: rising levels of fraud, cheating, stress, inequality and political stalemate.

ABOUT

Margaret Heffernan produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she spearheaded multimedia productions for Intuit, The Learning Company and Standard&Poors. She was Chief Executive of InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and then iCast Corporation, was named one of the “Top 25” by Streaming Media magazine and one of the “Top 100 Media Executives” by The Hollywood Reporter.

GOOD READS

A Bigger Prize: Why Competition isn’t Everything and How We Do Better (2014), Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril (2011), The Naked Truth: A Working Woman’s Manifesto about Business and What Really Matters (2004)

KEY LINKS

Margaret Heffernan's website