Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take

podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story

from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's

targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you listen. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurtnickish. Microsoft and Apple, Coke and Pepsi, Airbus and Boeing.

The list of competitive Arch Rival's goes on and on.

And rivals don't make up one of Porter's Five Forces for nothing.

That framework shows that if you have few of them,

you have more power to charge higher prices, but if you have many rivals offering competing

products and services, you have less power Rival's hurt your bottom line. But our

guest today says that having rivals doesn't have to be all bad. A growing body of

research shows that they can even elevate performance, at least on the individual

level when you have successful people that you measure yourself against, but also in some cases

on the organizational level.

Adam Grant has been studying this.

He's an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School

at the University of Pennsylvania.

He's also an author and the host of the podcast Work Life. Adam, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

You survey the research first on rivalries and kind of how they affect performance and then

you also went out into the field yourself and interviewed everyone from like food truck vendors in Texas to the

Norwegian National Ski Team and after all that like what do you think is the biggest

misunderstanding that we have about rivalries? I mean, I think the simple misunderstanding is that your rival is your enemy.

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