Yet we look around and evolution’s result is diversity – because often the best way to compete is to not compete directly or at all. Winning does not imply someone else losing, and there are lots of ways to skin a cat.

This is an important lesson in business, and the heart of such strategies as the blue ocean strategy (where you try to identify uncatered markets rather than compete for the same one as someone else) and Keynsian macro-economics (where instead of “cutting the fat” to be more competitive in the current market, you try to grow the market as a whole.)

It is also why you have things like the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People highlighting the need to think win-win. In evolutionary terms it doesn’t matter if you share your territory with a whole load of other species, so long as you can get the raw resources you need to breed.

Which can mean of course maintaining other species – such as with humans domesticating farm animals. For those animals being domesticated is a very valid, very good survival strategy that ensures they pass on their genes, for us they provide food and a degree of labour.

And so it is in business. It doesn’t matter if a whole load of other businesses are around so long as you are making a profit. It is generally a better idea for business relationships – whether they are boss/employee or between businesses – to be mutually beneficial than situations where one is exploiting the other.

Henry Ford once argued that if you sell cars cheaply to many, and pay your workers well, you will end up selling some of your cars to your workers and encouraging the growth of markets to support the automotive industry, thus selling more cars to the people working in those markets.

You thriving does not necessitate someone else suffering, and inflicting pain on others is often ultimately counter-productive.

Consider environmental damage caused by alien species – often those species deplete certain resources faster than the native ones ending up with desertification and an overall environment that is more hostile to them than the one they started out with.

These aliens out-compete the native species, but are how successful does this leave them in the longer term?

A lot of major world economies oppose introducing measures to slow down climate change because it hurts their ability to compete. Nevermind that in the long run not dealing with climate change may end up being more expensive.

We aren’t rabbits on Robben Island – we can more readily note the importance of maintaining our environment to our long term survival and yet we still fall into the trap of thinking about competition before success.

Variation and cooperation are valid and often beneficial survival strategies. These strategies are the key to adopting green economies. Straight competition has its place and extinction is a big part of evolution and business, but it isn’t everything.

Before we consider how we compete we should consider how we thrive, because survival of the fittest does not mean the fittest exterminate everything else. If winning strips our ability to feed our people, or destroys our homes then we aren’t really winning, we are just competing.