Be competitive or achieve success?

Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.  ~Vince Lombardi

This week I heard a story on NPR that did, and didn't, surprise me.  It was a follow-up to the now infamous and wildly successful ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  As the story reported, it's been 75 years since baseball great Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with the disease.  But there is still no cure or even hopeful treatment, only experimental trials. 

The story reported, one of the possible reasons why there still remains little hope for those with this disease is the "hypercompetitive" nature of the research field.  "Many excellent grant proposals get turned down, simply because there's not enough money to go around.  So scientists are tempted to oversell weak results.  Getting a grant requires that you have an exciting story to tell, that you have preliminary data and you have published.  In the rush, to be perfectly honest, to get a wonderful story out on the street in a journal, and preferably with some publicity to match, scientists can cut corners."

While listening to this interview I also learned that scientists tend to keep their failures to themselves.  If a study doesn't prove successful, it's not worthy of publication or of sharing with the broader research field.  That means instead of systematically ruling out what doesn't work; we may very well keep researching and trying the same unsuccessful experiments over and over.  Because staying individually competitive has taken precedence over collective success for the field to find a cure or treatment for ALS.

I wasn't surprised by this because a number of years ago I did some work for a leading research scientist for HIV/AIDS and heard a similar story.  Data wasn't being shared or collected on a massive basis in order to more quickly rule out what wasn't working; hence, making the process for success slow and cumbersome.

Being competitive or achieving success is not always a mutually exclusive choice, but sometimes it is.  I frequently hear leaders say they believe their organization benefits from internal competition.  Maybe that's true, but maybe it's not.  If it means staff are individually withholding their failures or are overselling weak results, then I'd have to ask if that's really helping or hindering the organization's overall collective success?

Maybe this perspective especially caught my attention because I know someone who recently passed away due to ALS.  It made me wonder, if we could get over our own individual competiveness and really focus on collective success in the field of ALS, could that have made a difference for her?

What's more important to you, to be competitive or achieve success?