When Goliaths Clash

War Zone

Conflicts are a little like taxes. You’d love to be able to do away with them entirely. In reality, you just hope to learn how to manage them effectively. Effectively managing conflict is one of the secrets to an organization’s success. Companies that fixate on eliminating conflict altogether are as doomed to failure as those which ignore conflict, thus creating an organization where internal competition is even fiercer than marketplace competition. Neither extreme is healthy. The enemy isn’t conflict. It’s conflict in a destructive form that threatens everything the organization is striving to achieve.

These days, the vocabulary once relegated to the battlefield has become common parlance in the boardroom. You hear of people getting "blown up" or "set up" or "booby trapped" or "ambushed." Executives talk of "rolling out the big guns." Ideas get "shot down." Executives soberly discuss their "plan of attack." And every executive wants to go "on the offensive." It sounds like corporate life has become tantamount to war - the continual context of conflict can incite warring factions to rise up, even within an organization.

Conflict occurs at every level...