“Whenever we use a hierarchy, we make a trade-off between coordination and voice. Hierarchy creates a fundamental tension between suppressing individuality to achieve synchrony and denying key insights from those below.”

Every recent American president has gotten a dog, even Obama, whose daughter is allergic. Basketball teams that are a point down at half-time are more likely to win than if they were a point ahead. Men gain weight when their wife is pregnant.

What do these three facts have in common? They stem from our existence as social animals, our innate tendency to compare ourselves to others and often to compete with them. Evolution suggests two different strategies for interacting with others: cooperation and competition. When we cooperate, we emphasize warmth and relatability, perhaps by getting a dog: when we compete, we try to outdo others and use them as a baseline for our own success, perhaps even judging whether we are overweight by comparing our weight to that of those closest to us. Which setting we believe we’re in can make a huge difference to our expectations and to how we behave.

The overall thesis of Friend and Foe, though they try for nuance, often seems to boil down to cooperating with your enemies until you have an advantage, then smiting them. Not exactly profound. It is in the details that the book gets fascinating, however. Chapters consider issues like bargaining, hierarchy, and corporate apologies, and how our experience of either competition or collaboration can push us in different directions. A company that cuts the CEO’s wage along with that of employees often sees much less strife, they suggest, because employees then experience the cut as a collaborative, not a competitive, situation.

The book is a fun read with a lot of great applications, and addresses an issue of core concern to all of us. Recommended.

Disclosure: I read this book as an advance reader copy. You can read more copies, and pre-order a copy, on amazon: Friend and Foe. It is released September 29th.