When Kai-Fu Lee, a key Microsoft employee, decided to leave to go work for one of their competitors he had an… interesting experience:

Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure… At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “F*cking Eric Schmidt [Google’s CEO] is a f*cking pussy. I’m going to f*cking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f*cking kill Google.”

– Source: John Batelle’s blog

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really, really tired of the “business as war” approach. I’m sick of hearing about the market as a battlefield, competitors as enemies who should be killed and employees as foot soldiers.

Executives who buy this kind of thinking can be found looking for business advice in Sun Tzu’s “The art of war”, Clausewitz’s “On War” or even Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. A recent business book called “Hardball” praises companies who are “ruthless”, “mean”, “willing to hurt their rivals” and “enjoy watching their competitors squirm”.

But war is a terrible metaphor for business. It locks a company into an adversarial approach in which almost everyone becomes an enemy. It means spending time looking for ways to defeat your enemies, rather than making your own business great. It leads to zero-sum thinking, in which others have to lose, in order for you to win.
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