A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better Than the Competition Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Margaret Heffernan (Author, Narrator), Audible Studios (Publisher)

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Get into the best schools. Land your next big promotion. Dress for success. Run faster. Play tougher. Work harder. Keep score. And whatever you do make sure you win.

Competition runs through every aspect of our lives today. From the cubicle to the race track, in business and love, religion and science, what matters now is to be the biggest, fastest, meanest, toughest, richest. The upshot of all these contests? As Margaret Heffernan shows in this eye-opening audiobook, competition regularly backfires, producing an explosion of cheating, corruption, inequality, and risk. The demolition derby of modern life has damaged our ability to work together. But it doesn't have to be this way. CEOs, scientists, engineers, investors, and inventors around the world are pioneering better ways to create great products, build enduring businesses, and grow relationships. Their secret? Generosity. Trust. Time. Theater.

From the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts to the classrooms of Singapore and Finland, from tiny start-ups to global engineering firms and beloved American organizations like Ocean Spray, Eileen Fisher, Gore, and Boston Scientific, Heffernan discovers ways of living and working that foster creativity, spark innovation, reinforce our social fabric, and feel so much better than winning.

Listening Length

15 hours and 48 minutes
Author

Margaret Heffernan
Narrator

Margaret Heffernan
Audible release date

April 14, 2015
Language

English
Publisher

Audible Studios
ASIN

B00V3LVI06
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	15 hours and 48 minutes
Author	Margaret Heffernan
Narrator	Margaret Heffernan
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	April 14, 2015
Publisher	Audible Studios
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B00V3LVI06
Best Sellers Rank	#330,472 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #101 in Occupational & Organizational Psychology (Audible Books & Originals) #867 in Workplace Culture (Audible Books & Originals) #1,406 in Occupational & Organizational Popular Psychology

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

30 global ratings

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Amazon Customer

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

very good book, excellent condition. I am glad I choose to read this book

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jcn

decent idea

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

Very good book with lofty goal. Maybe a little too optimistic, but worth a try.

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DaleO

A good treatement about how the ideology of competition can get out of hand

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2015

Verified Purchase

A thorough treatment of the dark side of competition, all the way from family dynamics to the global economy.

One person found this helpful

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Kristin Maschka

challenge your assumptions

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2015

Verified Purchase

Heffernan successfully challenges our assumption that competition is best - and inevitable - with wide ranging examples showing The perils of competitive behavior and the benefits of collaboration in just about every aspect of our lives.

One person found this helpful

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Brian Ward

A great book!

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2014

Verified Purchase

The author discusses comprehensively and with great clarity how the toxic aspects of competition
have pervaded our daily lives at huge cost, and that's not financial cost.

One person found this helpful

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SFTT

A Decent Attempt at an Alternate World-View but Fails in the Technique

Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2015

There are two approaches by which you can read this book. You can either read it as a business exposition on competition with a more top-down view. This would have relevance to fields such as policy-making, economics, an MBA class, etc. The other way to read it would be as a self-help book to help you understand how competition in daily life causes you suffering. In the first manner, the book passes but barely. In the second manner, the book fails drastically.

Let’s start with the good. The book certainly covers a lot of domains upon which competition is used. Family relationships, marriage, education, the pharmaceuticals industry, corporate businesses, employee-owned firms, etc. And along the way you learn some cool facts. You might have suspected that the only thing that good exam-taking skills show is well good exam-taking skills. But do know why? Apparently, there’s a gene called COMT that regulated dopamine absorption after increases in stress levels. The faster it absorbs it, the better the test-taker you will be. Furthermore, the book does well to give a variety of opinions and not attribute this malady of competition to any one factor. While neurological factors might certainly play a factor, they are tempered by environmental and social attributes.

But I’m afraid that’s all for the good. While the book covers a lot of fields in each different chapter, you do not need to read each chapter to find out what it says. The basic format of each chapter in simple terms is:

1). Start with example of competition in a domain (say education).

2). State how bad it is (give multiple examples for this and various anecdotes).

Steps 1 and 2 may be exchanged from chapter to chapter.

3). State examples of entities that are doing the exact opposite.

4). By virtue of these opposing entities existing, an anti-competition route is possible.

Basically, you could read one or two chapters and could imply the central tenet of each of the future chapters in the book. Now this is disappointing because I read a book to learn new things or change my view of the world at regular junctures. If I wanted the same thing over and over again, I would do well to simply read a New Yorker essay that could similarly enlighten me. I believe that Mrs. Heffernan would have been better served if she had simply written an essay on her tenets than stretch it out to a repetitive book.

Moreover, this book fails in trying to shift my world-view (and I presume, of others). How many of us know that competition is bad? How many of us know that it pervades the world? All of us. Aren’t many of us told by our caring mothers from childhood to focus on ourselves. That all of us are special in our own individual way? AND YET, we continue to compete despite knowing the reasons not to. All Mrs. Heffernan does in this book is to become our mothers again and tell us what we already know. Perhaps not in the lengthy way that the author prescribes but certainly in one intuitive manner or another.

Furthermore, I suspect that this book has a very harmful bias: that of selective evidence. Mrs. Heffernan gives us countless examples of firms that are employee-owned and continue to do well. And while she gives quotes from company executives about how this model has served them well, there isn’t exact proof that this anti-competitive employee-owned model is what is responsible for their success. What about the actual quality of their product? What about market structures? And what about firms that are employee-owned and still fail? While I don’t mean to espouse the rampant competitive framework, it certainly is the author’s prerogative to use the most objective evidence as possible.

Lastly, Instead of banal cliche’s such as collaboration>competition or that love and trust win I would have loved it if the book at shown ways that could show us, at an individual level, that competition=suffering. I’m afraid that after reading this book, a lot of people, maybe for a week, maybe for a month might stop their competitive beliefs. But like all of the self-help books that lie in useless heaps, they will again resort to their normal selves.

And that allows me to come to what I started with at the beginning. If I was an MBA professor, this book would be an good critique on competition on macro-levels. It shows that our current ways of doing things are bad. But systems are made up of individuals. Therefore if you want systems to change, you must show these individuals that competition isn anti-life, that it is actually harmful for them. I’m not sure if a book can succeed in this. It is only when an individual internalises a truth that he can live by them. And my 2 cents would be that only experience can teach them this. A book can’t.

6 people found this helpful

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Monica!

Rated Can't-Put-It-Down For General Audiences

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018

Bottom Line: Highly recommended reading for just about everyone; very engaging reading with discrete chapters dovetailing into a wrapped-up theme at the end.

The material in this book will ring familiar to those undertaking teacher's education in the past five years or so (remember your developmental and educational psychology courses?), and also to those who have read about the reasons for peaceful or nonviolent parenting.

The chapters are fairly discrete—each deals with different industries and institutions, but they are analyzed toward the theme of understanding the differences between cooperatist versus competitive achievement structures to great effect. The writing is active and interesting, and even though I found myself wanting more from the chapters dealing with topics with which I am familiar, it was not an unsatisfied wanting. Rather, I found my interest in these topics expanding in cool new directions that make me want to return to those topics for a different taste. The topics I am unfamiliar with remained highly interesting, as well, which surprised me because I had an internal groan when I was embarking reading about something I thought I wouldn't be interested in (I know—not very enlightened of me). I'm glad I persisted, though. None of the chapters failed to stimulate or increase understanding.

Because the book deals with so many different industries, I would recommend this for just about everyone—you can take the topic of beneficial versus harmful human social arrangements and abstract it across pretty much everything that brings humans together. And though the book is fairly light on solutions, I think it solidly adds to the literature supporting greater, more optimistic cooperation among humans. Nor is the fact that the book is light on solutions a terrible mark against it, as I think that the new direction it supports has not quite yet been witnessed on earth, and we have only our imaginations to guide us to the best, and then better, and then better, ad infinitum, structures and arrangements. Improvement is a process, and this book helps redirect at the margins to better processes.

Enjoy!

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A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better Than the Competition Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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