TRANSCOMPETITION

A Business Week Book

Transcompetition: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
by Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
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Hardcover, 240 pages
Published by McGraw-Hill
Publication date: April 18, 1998
ISBN: 0070530823

ST. PAUL, MN, December 17 -- The Why Things Don't Work Institute has released the names of the winners of the 1999 Metamoron Awards.

The Metamorons are awarded annually by The Why Things Don't Work Institute to those organizations and individuals, public and private, whose behavior typifies brutality toward customers and employees, and blindness toward their own long-term advantage.

The name metamoron was coined by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, authors of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK, to describe the inability of organizations to countenance change necessary for survival.

This year's awards has an ominous theme of convergence. Whereas previous years focused on boneheaded policies of runamok corporations, this year sees an apocalyptic specter leading the world, especially at the governmental level, to the brink of self-destruction.

Here the award winners are, in reverse order:

10. The Gather Ye Eyeballs While Ye May Award has been issued to America Online. At first glance, AOL's acquisition of Netscape was hailed as a victory for anti-Microsoft forces. But given AOL's past indifference to its customers, it is hard to see it as a savior for the average Internet user. Indeed, the outcome is likely to be the abandoning of the Netscape browser as a head-to-head competitor with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Internet, which should be a virtual commons for the world, a place where every individual has the chance to speak up, is deteriorating into a war for the eyeballs between large corporations.

9. The New Sacred Cow Award for 1999 goes to Japan. Remember 20 years ago when Japan appeared to be the most enlightened business sphere in the world? Things have changed. In the fifth year of a recession which has spread across all of East Asia and threatens to engulf the world economy, Japan still refuses to make key commonsense reforms: globalizing the yen, opening its markets to imports, and eliminating protectionism of its powerful but irrelevant agricultural base. The average Japanese cattle farm in Japan has two cows, yet its handful of politically powerful and reactionary farmers may bring down the world. The principles Japan embodied in the 70s -- quality, teamwork, far-sightedness and customer friendliness -- have fallen by the wayside.

8. The Ain't Technology Grand? Award goes to systems consultants who are advising many computer-driven organizations to give up on solving the Year 2000 Problem now. It's too late for that, say the people who could have started solving the problem ten years ago. Instead, the time has come to triage IT functions: save the truly mission-critical functions, and let the others crash and die come January 1, 2000. The Gartner Group now estimates Y2K costs will top $1 trillion globally -- $600 billion now, and the rest to bandage the bleeding that will follow. For example, AT&T early last year thought it might spend around $300 million on the problem but now the corporate giant says it could be triple that, the magazine said. It doesn't take Nostradamus to predict what a $1 trillion hole in the world economy, combined with the meltdown of Asian markets, will do to global well-being. Best-case scenario: the Hale-Bopp Comet will swing back this way and we can hitch a ride out of here.

7. The Quality Crisis We Dare Not Acknowledge Award goes to the PC industry. In January we published a report about quality problems at Compaq Computer. That article triggered a flood of feedback from owners of every brand of PC, including Apple, detailing the inability of new PC owners to get working computers, or their money back. The bottom line is that no one's computers -- not just Compaq's -- work as advertised today, and lemons are shamefully difficult to replace. Over 50% of hard drives for new Wintel machines, according to a suppressed report, are not installing and will not install. It's a situation no other industry would tolerate, but which computer technology tolerates. The reason for this catastrophic failure: companies are too eager to "proprietize" their brands by adding their own differentiating new gimmicks like telecommunications interfaces that stretch Wintel specs to the breaking point. While the PC industry battles open systems, Linux and the open code movement are building in strength, and anti-Wintel groups are banding together to tell the truth about the shoddy boxes being peddled. Prediction: outright revolution in 2000.

6. The Flight of the Billionaires Award goes to the postmodern Midases who, having polluted the global economy with vicious standards of management and marketing, are now bailing out to serene paradises of their own making. Rupert Murdoch, the godfather of rotten news, has announced his intention to retire to a Pacific island belonging to him, in order to contemplate spiritual matters. And hard-driving Bill Gates has built himself a CyberXanadu in Washington State where Good Neighbor Bill can pursue philanthropic matters, ponder our technological future, and perform full chest X-rays on anyone who dares rings his doorbell. Close your eyes and you can practically see the camel slithering through the needle's eye.

5. The Convergence of the Twain Award, taking its name from Thomas Hardy's poem about the iceberg and the Titanic, goes to the merger of Exxon and Mobil to form a $220 billion (annual revenue) enterprise. We take the two companies' word that the synergies of scale will pose no hardship to consumers, and that the 10,000 layoffs worldwide are easily absorbable. But this merger means there are now ten corporations that could rank in the top 30 nations in resources. If they were nations, which they are not. Think of it this way: if Exxon and Mobil are not big enough to compete globally by themselves, how long will it be until the two combined are not big enough? At what point -- if this has not happened already -- do they stop working for us, and we start working for them? As Adam warned Eve, "Stand back, I don't know how big this gets."

4. The Thoreau Was Wrong Award is bestowed on Russia, living refutation of the libertarian view that "that government governs best which governs least." Russia has no government at all, and just look at it.

3. The Sporting Life Award is conferred, with all its rank and privileges, to car salesman and Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga. In the best tradition of megabuck competition, Huizenga whipped out his checkbook, bought the best baseball team money could buy, and won the 1997 World Series. Then, to strip whatever sentimentality lingered about the grand old game, he sold off his 1997 stars, replaced them with bargain basement players, sold the team for a handsome profit, and stood on the sidelines as the 1998 team stumbled to a demoralized last-place finish. But it's still the game that matters, and loyalty, and sportsmanship, and the thrill of competition, not money, right, Wayne? Right?

2. The Up In Smoke Award goes to the attorney generals of the 46 states who successfully litigated a $206 billion lawsuit against the tobacco industry. Here in our neck of the woods, Hubert H. Humphrey III was considered the front runner for the gubernatorial elections. But voters sensed that the windfall was not what it seemed, and migrated to Jesse Ventura instead. They were wise to, because the settlement hardly punishes Big Tobacco at all; tobacco companies pay only 1% of the settlement out of pocket. The rest is funded by insurance and a new tax on the very people whom the tobacco companies are hurting most -- smokers. By all means, we need deliverance from predatory products like not-so-Lucky Strikes. But this settlement is a tax on the victims of the lawsuit. It is an appalling deception by the people who should be fighting hardest for the citizenry's health and well-being -- no wonder voters are turning to populist newcomers like Ventura to set things aright.

1. Finally, the Squeezer Augustus Award to the about-to-be-impeached President of the United States, and to those who put the squeeze on him. We have no ringing defense for a President who lied about a sexual liaison. (Our very weak defense is that he's out of control and needs help, but is too much in denial to seek it.) Republicans believe America's integrity, and the moral vision of our children, requires flushing a President from office for this scale of shortcoming. We see it as a final foretoken in this year of apocalypse: Bill Clinton, warts and all, may have been the last U.S. President willing to use political power to achieve his ends -- squeezing hands on the campaign trail like no one before him, squeezing donors for cash, squeezing allies for cooperation, squeezing opponents for concessions, squeezing tinpot dictators for the headlines, and squeezing interns for the rotten fun of it. He will be remembered as the last of the big squeezers, the last president willing and able to do terrible things to drive a positive agenda through. We will remember that the great squeezers of the past -- the Roosevelts, Lincoln, Truman, Reagan -- had their uses, and were valued for them. But the cap is off the impeachment toothpaste tube now, and no future leader will be exempt from the inevitable squeeze.

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