The best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government, industry, or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.

In preparing youths toward leadership in government, industry or other fields, the statement above takes an extreme position; with avoiding instilling a sense of competition the statement recommends instilling a spirit of cooperation in the young generation. I agree with such an assertion in instilling cooperation in youths, but at the same time, youths need to have an active competitive spirit in order to become effective leaders.

To begin with, inducing of a sense of competition in the young generation is required because competition exists in every aspects of life and the young generation needs to know how to deal with competitive situation in order to be ready for leadership. Competition exists in every corner that the demand is more than supply. Some win in satisfying their demands, and some lose because the supply is limited. A leader needs to know how to be a winner in competing with others. Furthermore, competition is the basis of the nature that directs evolution toward becoming stronger individuals and elimination of those who are weak. Hence, to become stronger and manage the life which is based on the competition, the competition spirit is needed to be instilled in young generation.

At the same time, to pass sound and sturdy through such a competitive world, the same youth needs to learn how to cooperate. To instill a cooperation spirit means to teach the young generation how to assimilate into a team toward a common goal. In such a competitive arena individuals alone cannot survive. No matter how much young people are diligent and self-sufficient, people alone cannot achieve success and they need to be helped and in turn help others to thrive. Consider such a good role model as Steve Jobs. When he was deciding to do something exceptional, he tried hard to establish a nexus of cooperation between different engineers and in doing that he introduced technological horizons not observable even by the giants of that time such as heads of INTEL. Having known the mores of cooperation, such a leader did not “waist” his time to learn many different fields. While he was a professional in the programming, he made cooperation with other professionals in a variety of fields to achieve great successes.

Finally, an appropriate way to bring up a leader is to provide him the situations inducing both cooperative and competitive spirits. For example, when he/she becomes the CEO of a company, while he/she needs to have a spirit of cooperation inside his/her company, he needs to be aware of what other companies are doing in order not to fall back. Consider two successful companies in the hot market of cell phones: Sony and Samsung. They are rivals in the arena of cell phone marketing, one from Japan and the other from South Korea. At the same time they make cooperation with each other, For example the LCD of their certain cell phones is the joint product between Sony and Samsung. Having these two successful giants companies in mind, we see that in the competitive world we need to have leaders who know when to compete and when to cooperate to become successful.

In short, we need both to instill competitive and cooperative spirits in the young generation because successful leaders are both possessing some degree of competitiveness and cooperativeness in their characteristics.