A recent white paper by IBMer Peter Andrews, titled "Promoting Rivalry for Innovation's Sake," says innovation within large corporations is stagnant because politically correct rules of conduct have squelched the internal conflict that formerly spurred progress. Andrews goes on to explain how relaxing behavioral restrictions that, for example, make it impolitic to say, "We're better than that other team," can revive internal competition. Andrews never comes out and says so, but IBM is an obvious example of innovation suppressed by so-called politeness policies.

The paper gives many useful suggestions to help staid corporations lighten up. It should, for example, be okay to have modest victory dances (although one strains to imagine this occurring in Rochester or Armonk). It should also be okay for one team to exploit ideas from another team as long as the borrowers give proper attribution. Workplace cubism should give way to employee-designed workspace and furnishings. These are the sorts of suggestions that make bean counters and facilities planners faint.

As I read more, though, I laughed out loud at one glaring omission: the lack of an example of corporate rivalry delivering benefits in a modern technology enterprise. Andrews talks of Renaissance painters, old-West explorers, and the U.S. manned space program. Surely there is a more recent example supporting the author's thesis.

There is, and it's an obvious one: Apple Computer. If you want to see internal competition in action, Apple is the place to find it. Apple's internecine battles are legendary, starting with the breakaway group that created the innovative Lisa computer — the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface. The Lisa team plundered technology from the staid Xerox PARC research organization and repurposed the original Lisa product from a mere Apple II upgrade to rethink the personal computer (which, incidentally, Apple also invented).

Despite the Lisa team's staggering bravado, another Apple development group, the Macintosh team, soon outflanked it. Led by Apple founder Steve Jobs, who was rebuffed when he tried to take over the Lisa team, the Macintosh group raided other Apple groups for key people, redirected internal resources, and generally stirred up a hornet's nest of internal conflict. At one point Jobs hoisted a skull-and-crossbones flag above the Macintosh project building to leave no doubt about the group's intentions. A famous quote from Jobs at the time: "It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy."

The track record of rivalry within Apple continued, resulting in a constant string of undeniably innovative products: LaserWriter, the first personal laser printer; Newton, the first PDA; AppleTalk, the first commercial local-area network; Airport, the first personal wireless network; and, of course, iPod, the first MP3 appliance. It's important to note that not all Apple innovations were successful products. The Lisa flopped in the marketplace. The Newton was too big and its handwriting recognition input too unwieldy. It was an idea too advanced for the available technology. But nobody denies either product's vision, which launched, respectively, the modern graphical interface and a trillion-dollar PDA industry.

The lesson to learn from Apple, though, isn't just to understand healthy internal conflict in action. Apple's corporate culture is characterized by another key aspect, one not discussed much in IBM's white paper: permission to risk failure. Unlike at IBM and many other large technology corporations, Apple employees have implicit permission to take risks without dooming their careers. In fact, the whole concept of "career" at Apple is different from traditional companies, where a product failure means at best ostracism and at worst an embarrassing termination. At IBM, like NASA, "Failure is not an option."

At Apple, it is.