Competition is a part of our lives. In school we competed for both academic and athletic standing. We play games like tennis or chess in which we compete for the sake of competition. We compete for dates and mates.
In some cultures competition is bad manners. In ours, competitiveness is a major virtue but is supposed to be practiced with good manners. On the playing field this is called sportsmanship, is supposed to be practiced by gentlemen and ladies, and sometimes is. In industry sportsmanship reduces to rudimentary courtesy. In criticism between architects and between academics it sometimes reduces to savagery. Espionage, planting disinformation, and dirty tricks are not unknown.
As a design engineer you compete with other design engineers both inside your company and outside it. If your company sells a product, then you, as part of your company, are competing with other vendors attempting to sell their product in place of yours.
You may compete with an in-house department of one of your customers. One client makes active dampers for automobiles. Once they made a presentation to major auto manufacturer H but were told that the customer had an in-house group working on a similar product and that the group's design was favored because it was in house. The client pulled a working model from his briefcase and presented it. The model put him ahead of the customer's in-house group, and he won a contract as a result. His competitive victory was based in part on the technical merits of his design, but he won largely because his extra energy and diligence had moved his program farther and faster than his competitor's program. We all compete with the calendar and the clock.
Within your own organization you compete with others for budgets (including raises), for facilities, for helpers, for rank and position, for desirable assignments, and for the selection of competing ideas.
If you work in a government military laboratory, your competitors are called Russians.
If you work on almost anything, some of your competitors are called Japanese.
If you work in academic research, your competitors are other re-searchers racing you to publication, recognition of priority, prestige, promotions, political position, and grants.
If you work in a large corporation, there is competition for budget and assignments between the R&D departments of the divisions and the corporate central R&D department.
If you work in a corporation, you are faced with the competition of contract R&D companies and universities that propose to your management that they can do better work for less money than you do.
If you work in almost any kind of organization, you help it compete with other organizations for sales and contracts.
What Wins?
In football the components of winning are touchdowns and field goals. What wins for the design engineer?
The first winner is design merit.
The second winner is speed-getting there first.
The third winner is persuasion-making your customers believe that buying from you is best for them. Persuading them that your design has the most merit is part, but only part, of that persuasion.
The fourth winner is prediction. What are the competitors thinking? What will they do? Which way will they turn? How do their minds work? If you know a lot about them and their circumstances, you have a good chance to create a design strategy which will beat them. That's how generals win battles.
