Competition can be of two types, healthy and unhealthy. Healthy competition inculcates the drive to improve and work towards achieving the objective in a more positive manner. Often time people associate the competition aspect with something harmful when it’s not.
Imagine yourself continuing to achieve whatever you want in this world without anyone around you to let you know how better you did at certain points in time or in life altogether. How would you know that studying better would yield better grades and that comes with hard work?
If there weren’t competition, you would study whatever you deemed fit. There wouldn’t be so many trades or fields of study or business for that matter. You could just be learning about how to plant crops without knowing how to ensure a better yield of those same crops. With completion, you know that the farmer across from you has pesticides to account for pests and insects that destroy the crops and thus is able to materialize his hard work into lots of revenue.
Consequently, you too decide to try out the pesticide and double your profits both in monetary terms as well as the quality of crops. From this arises the need for creation of other brands of pesticides so that farmers prefers one over the other so that the producers could make more money and name for themselves than the other.
Similarly, the merchant who would purchase your produce when you would take it to the urban centers for sale. Why would he agree to pay more for the same crops that apparently shared the same land, sunlight, and effort, that you also put it but farmer ‘x’ across from you gets the better price, why? It is simply because he has a better yield (quality) and quantity and you that it was just you who were doing fine.
So it is basically a cycle that runs everywhere and in all walks of life. Without competition around us, our lives would be akin to the concept of terminal velocity or will remain stagnant. It is, therefore, imperative that competitive advantage is achieved.
In the education sector, a master’s degree holder will be preferred more than a mere graduate. In the technical field, a person with more hands-on experience will be preferred to that person who is relatively new, why? Because more educated means more knowledge, more experienced means more seasoned at handling job-related tasks.
What do you do? You compete. You further your education, you enrich your experience, and you begin to realize the potential you thought you never possessed. Isn’t that so? Now there is another side to it as well. The unhealthy side, as I would like to call it.
Unhealthy competition means the employing of underhanded tactics to gain benefits over your rival(s). Underhanded techniques could be the use of illegal/immoral means to extract or infiltrate your rival corporation, although, corporate espionage is no more considered an indecent maneuver partially because all big organizations are involved in it one or the other but ethically it is still wrong.
To bribe someone for spilling the secrets or going to the lengths by abducting or causing irreparable damage to the rival (setting fire to the warehouse of the rival, for example), is unhealthy and the economy as it should have will never flourish.
In a nutshell, the competition can be both good and bad; it is the human factor as well the forces of demand and supply which shape the way it will head.
Author Bio: Maks Perrotta works for a leading management consultancy firm and has a knack for blogging. He writes to educate his readers about the corporate world, in addition to the principles that governs any economy. You can contact him for dissertation writing providers by following him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.