Have You Thanked Your Competition Recently?

Its OK to admit it.  Most of us hate our competitors.  They are always doing something to make our job miserable.  However, two recent articles got me to thinking maybe we should be thankful for this constant pain in the ass competition.

From Seth Godin,

You can pretend that you are unique, that you have no competition and never will. Inevitably, this will create an attitude that, while fun for a while, will probably harm you later. The alternative is to acknowledge that the competition exists and in fact, to encourage it.

and the The Red Queen among Organizations takes this to another level with an academic discussion around the need for competition in order to survive:

If today your organization encounters competition, it will not perform as well as it might have otherwise. To meet this challenge, you will likely attempt to improve; you may even experiment with new ways of approaching the job at hand. If you succeed, now your rivals face stronger competition from you, as your solutions have become their problems.

Bottom line, you don’t have to like your competition but you should be grateful that you are in the game being pushed to make your product even better.