In my experience, internal competition in a sufficiently large organization is inevitable. This may be a hot take but I think it can be healthy. Also trying to

In my experience, internal competition in a sufficiently large organization is inevitable. This may be a hot take but I think it can be healthy. Also trying to eliminate internal competition can often be worse than internal competition. Why? Because management ends up anointing a "winner" when there are competing proposals before anyone has built anything. This rewards people who are good at getting projects approved rather than execution. And I've seen so many bad projects, late projects and projects that fail that come out of a process like this. More often than not, those who started the project have long since claimed credit and moved on to other projects or companies so any failures get blamed on execution. Additionally, the process of anointing a winner takes time and resources you don't necessarily have. Those decisions are typically based on factors that don't matter or wrong assumptions you'll only find out when the rubber hits the road. Look at iOS and MacOS. A certain breed of manager would've decided this internal competition was "bad" and would've spent a year figuring out which one to invest in because "two OSs are bad". Rather than getting paralyzed with indecision, it's nearly always better to ship earlier and figure out what to do later. Look no further than Windows to see why. Steve Ballmer, who came up as the business head of Windows, saw everything through the lens of Windows everywhere. So when smartphones became a thing, what did he do? Adapt the Windows OS to phones of course. Microsoft lost time to market and Windows Phone went nowhere. Years earlier Microsoft bought the then popular Sidekick and rather than rolling with it they spent years figuring out how to move it to Windows. This can of course go wrong. Anything can. But in a sufficiently large organization your attitude should be how to handle internal competition not how do you eliminate it. The latter is a fool's errand.