A former business journalist, she is now a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Seattle Times, and more. She has held adjunct faculty positions in communications at the University of Washington and Seattle University and is the author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work, MIT Press’s top-selling book of 2022. Ruchika was born in Singapore and has lived in six cities across four countries.
She is the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2019; Shortlisted for the 2023 Thinkers50 Talent Award; and co-wrote one of HBR.org’s top 100 most read articles in history: Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. Ruchika invests in and advises various ventures as a Venture Capital limited partner and angel investor.
Her new book, Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success is now available.
Two words come to mind when I think about my friend Aiko: abundance and community. In a traditional workplace, Aiko and I would be competitors. We both run DEI
consultancies, often pitching to the same clients. One year we literally competed for the same project — and Aiko got it. YAY! We’ve both keynoted the same conferences in different years. She’s been in this work far longer than I have, and by the usual “Queen Bee” logic, we should have seen each other as rivals.
But from the moment we met, our eyes said something different: “You’re my community, not my competition.” Even before we spoke, there was mutual understanding. We both sensed that the way we related to each other reflected the kind of world we wanted to
build — one of belonging, justice, and inclusion. We knew that those goals couldn’t be reached in isolation. They demanded that we trust one another to keep moving forward together, especially while doing the vulnerable work of confronting bias and inequity in rooms that were not always welcoming.
True community rests on that foundation of trust — the conviction that we are stronger, more effective, and more fulfilled when we advance one another. The outcome of Aiko’s and my trust has been nearly a decade of friendship, mutual admiration, and celebration. Life pulls us in different directions — each of us is raising boys while running our own businesses — and sometimes a whole year passes before we reconnect. Yet I know that if I needed advice in the middle of the night, Aiko’s name would be in my top five texts. That kind of trust is rare, and I don’t take it for granted.
Competitive systems erode that trust — between individuals, within organizations, and across communities. They even depend on eroding it. Divide-and-conquer tactics are as old as civilization itself. To “get ahead” in today’s workplaces, we are encouraged to act strategically, to network only with people who can serve our ambitions, and to drop anyone who no longer seems “useful.” In our winner-take-all society, loyalty and empathy are treated as liabilities. It’s considered acceptable, even savvy, to turn on someone once they stop advancing your goals.
That mindset has seeped far beyond corporate culture. Public trust in institutions — government, media, business — continues to fall. Research shows that Americans have grown more distrustful not only of those systems but also of one another: coworkers, leaders, and neighbors alike. When we layer on systemic oppression — racism, misogyny, ableism, poverty — our divisions deepen further, making trust feel almost impossible. It’s hard to build community when the water we swim in teaches us suspicion.
And yet, community cannot exist without trust. The data bear this out. Neuroscientist Paul Zak’s decades of research on trust at work show that employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, energetic, and collaborative. They stay longer, experience less chronic stress, and report higher life satisfaction. Trust makes teams perform better — but its effects ripple outward, too. Societies with higher levels of trust have more engaged citizens and healthier democracies. People are far more likely to invest in and participate in their communities when they believe those communities are grounded in integrity and accountability.
Building an abundant community, then, is not a soft or sentimental project. It’s the practical work of undoing the scarcity conditioning that pits us against one another. Competition tells us to protect our slice of the pie; abundance reminds us we can bake a bigger one together. The antidote to rivalry is not passivity but reciprocity — the courage to give without calculating what you’ll get in return, and the humility to receive without shame.
This requires re-imagining success not as personal advancement but as collective flourishing. It calls us to choose long-term connection over short-term gain, to view trust as infrastructure, and to act as if lifting others is integral to lifting ourselves — because it is. The health of any society can be measured by the strength of its relationships, not the trophies of its individuals. That’s what Aiko and I learned in practice. Our friendship is proof that there is another way to work, lead, and live. We can share contacts, celebrate each other’s wins, and still thrive. We can build careers around generosity rather than scarcity. And we can create communities where collaboration, not competition, becomes the norm.
When we do that — when we trust, when we build abundance — we heal the fractures that systems of domination rely on. We stop letting fear dictate our relationships. And we start constructing something far more powerful in its place: a community in which everyone has room to rise.
Excerpted and adapted from UNCOMPETE by Ruchika T. Malhotra, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Ruchika Tulshyan.
