Even though I've written books about collaboration, my money's on rivalry as the medium and method that deserves greater investment and ingenuity from CIOs. While competition shouldn't be a dominant driver of your internal IT culture, it needs to be more than a spice: It has to be an essential ingredient. Yes, competition for the sake of competition is dumb — but so is collaboration for the sake of collaboration. You need to begin by learning how your existing IT culture defines the contours of its collaboration versus cooperation landscape.

While the answers aren't easy, the path to finding them is. Look at the three most common "success stories" your organization tells when it's reviewing past accomplishments. Then review the three most common "abysmal failure" tales your people tell. Here's the trick: Don't look for the heroes, villains, best practices or dumbest decisions. Instead, examine the competitive versus collaborative dynamics of each project. What role did competition and rivalry play in the successes and the failures? How did cooperation and sharing add value or induce paralysis?

You're guaranteed to discover your IT shop's comfort zones around rivalry and cooperation. Sometimes, feeling uncomfortable about competition is wonderful; other times, it signals the wrong kind of fear. Sometimes, collaborative, cooperative relationships indicate a well-run organization; then again, they can signal self-indulgent complacency. You need to know this.

At one global professional services firm, the CIO realized that office rivalry between regions had passed the point of diminishing returns. There was literally no incentive for offices to share best practices — or any meaningful information — at all. Not a single success story had anything to do with cross-office collaboration. In fact, because the offices were actually ranked against one another, collaboration was effectively discouraged. Effecting a change in incentives and culture proved easy. An outside consultancy recommended the straightforward remedy of making 20 percent of the regional CIO's bonus contingent upon demonstrable knowledge sharing and cost-savings between the units. The units were also ranked on how collaborative they were.

By contrast, another professional services firm IT shop was so collegial and collaborative that it passive-aggressively killed efforts to introduce IT innovations that would upset the existing comity. The IT people did a better job of collaborating with each other than with their internal clients. The clients came second. The result? The consultants bypassed IT and bootlegged budgeted IT innovations on their own. The CIO was ultimately asked to leave, and a non-IT partner was put in charge. A few of the surviving IT employees are unhappier, but the bulk of their internal clients are not. Internal competition energized both IT and its users.

Leadership means defining and designing the kind of marketplace that's best for your IT shop and enterprise. And it means having the courage to compete and collaborate and inspiring your people to do the same.

Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative. He can be reached at schrage@media.mit.edu