Competitive Boredom

Competition. It seems that the real estate industry has settled on one sure-fire way to handle competition: Absorb it. Most real estate companies justify recent mega-mergers as an effort to be “more competitive” but the sad irony is that these types of mergers actually reduce competition. Competitiveness can be fun and challenging–the very factors that make most of us get up and go to work every day. Without the sense of a competitive enemy, it’s likely to take the thrill out of the game.

A friend of mine, Michael Kerrison, owns a Minneapolis-based management consulting firm called EnduranceAmerica whose offer is to help companies “create the organization that, if it existed, would put yours out of business.”

Think about that. It’s a powerful statement that Mike turns into a question and immediately gets his client’s senior management teams thinking about what’s missing from their organizations in a non-threatening way. His question asks them to project rather than analyze, devise rather than criticize. Hope rather than fear.