Traditional beliefs in business fairness and efficiency were based on the presumption of a knowledgeable marketplace.

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In the past, we have trusted in external marketplace competition to keep individual managers’ foibles or poor choices from degrading the quality of internal competition too severely.  

By and large, we have believed business apologists when they said that the rigors of competition fostered, even required, essentially meritocratic working environments.   This was because it sounded self-evident to us that if a company did not recognize and promote its most genuinely capable and productive people, it would soon be overtaken in the marketplace by other companies that did.

However, this line of argument was plausible only as long as marketplace competition was reasonably substantive and rigorous. It loses much of its credibility in today's environment, where consumers cannot reasonably evaluate the things they buy, where competition has been moved off a substantive plane and onto a cognitive one, and where sheer corporate size has become a significant competitive "strategy."

 

(c) COPYRIGHT 1994   ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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