Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both

Friend and Foe by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer is a succinct book whose content is right on the cover page: “When to Cooperate, When to Compete and How to Succeed at Both.” Unfortunately, this book does not give quite enough. It pieces together interesting stories but fails to fully connect the dots between what others have done and what one should do in order to ‘strike the right balance’ in our own lives. While a superb introductory piece for conflict resolution and teamwork, I truly think that the authors could have made this book longer and better. They could have included more research, more hard evidence to back up their theories on innate human behavior and the sociology behind cooperate and competition.

Overall, it is a bit disappointing to read something from two PhDs that doesn’t have more heft to it. This book feels rushed, like a rough draft edited only for grammar not for content. For example, page 217 starts the section entitled “How to Avoid Being a Racist” and ends with a conclusion about perspective-taking. Wonderful, only in the in between there seems to be an emphasis on thinking about race and about suppressing thoughts. No offense, but this only applies if you yourself might have racist tendencies. How does this help me, I happen to be a person of color (or however I should be appropriately labeled to make you feel more comfortable) interact in the world to either cooperate, compete or do both with others who might be racist or who might have a different perspective than me? That is the actual content that books should be made out of, that this book, a self proclaimed how-to-book, should be helping me with. There were sections that I did find incredibly insightful, ‘How to Get Others to Put Their Trust in You’ is fabulous, if the whole book could be like this one, well, this review would have been shorter for sure. Perhaps Adam was wrong, perhaps the book Maurice was going to write alone would have been better than what they have written together.