COMPETING: Understanding and Winning the Strategic Games We All Play

A ho-hum treatise on competition, telling us pretty much what we already know--and that, pedantically. Since Ruben sees competition it, self as neither good nor bad (just the insistence on winning, if you can forgive, that paradox), he busies himself cataloguing it efficiently. He sketches, for example, a ""Four-Quadrant Competitor's Tool Box"" in which the divisions separate direct from indirect, aggressive from nonaggressive competition. In this scheme, Woody Allen characters are by-and-large ""Indinags""--Indirect Nonaggressives who substitute stoicism, irony, and feigned weakness for more direct competitive maneuvers. The gist is in Ruben's patently obvious exploration of competition in its various guises--from its roots in family and school to its ultimate expression in sports and the workplace. We are regaled with piteous tales of tots falling prey to sibling rivalry with their parents' tacit approval (the ""divide and conquer"" school of child rearing); or assurances that the foremost lure of the corporate ladder is ""status."" Skippable.