The best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government, industry, or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.

Leadership requires a large set of skills. A leader may have to face different kinds of scenarios at different points of their leadership career and hence would benefit from having a big arsenal. However, there are some skills that need to be sharpened more than the others. And I think cooperation is one of such skills. If someone wants to lead, it is very important for him to have developed a sense of cooperation, even more than the sense of competition.

A human is born with both the sense of cooperation and competition in himself. As a child, we sometimes cooperate with our friends to achieve somethings we cannot alone, and sometimes compete with them to achieve somethings we cannot together. Hence, both cooperation and competition are important in their own sense. However, humans are inherently selfish and wants to have it all for themselves, even if it reduces their likelihood to success. This selfishness makes human more bent towards competition. You can simply imagine yourself. Imagine, you come to know that there is a bag full of gold at the top of a hill. What would be the first thought in your mind? Would you think of telling it to someone so that they can help you go up the hill more easily or would you rather think of yourself with the bag of money enjoying? Yes, the answer is clear. But, it is not so much if you think of yourslef as a leader rather than an individual. Now imagine you are the leader of your tribe in an ancient world. Your tribe is struggling with poverty and now you've discovered a bag full of gold. Would you still want to prove yourself to be more successful and richer than others and keep the bag with yourself or would you want to cooperate and help your tribe live a better life? If you think of the first, you would no longer be their leader.

Moreover, from the earlier example what we also come to know that competition takes an individual to a higher level while cooperation takes the entire team. If you want to prepare a leader for our government, industry, or other fields, you would not want only them to become successful or gain fame. You do so because you want your nation to succeed and your industry to flourish. In such scenarios, the sense of cooperation is the must. For example, suppose, Bill Gates rather than being cooperative with the employee who pitched the idea of Microsoft Office, suppressed him just because he didn't want someone to challenge his authority by giving a more successful product, Micrsofot would have been nowhere around its status today. Someone else would have made something similar to Microsoft Office and Microsoft still would have been stuck with Windows only. The Windows too probably wouldn't have made any updgrade if Bill Gates wasn't cooperative enough to listen to the employees.

However, despite all the praises for the cooperative character of a leader, one shouldn't completely disregard the merit that sense of competition brings, if wielded properly. A leader should know when to cooperate and when to compete. One cannot be a leader without competing. You've to challenge the rivals and prove to be better than them to put your claim on the leadership position. King Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king of Gorkha, who unified Nepal, wouldn't have been able to do so if he had just cooperated with all other states rather than competing them for the throne. Microsoft too has competed with a lot of rivals and defeated them to remain where it is today. If Bill Gates had decided to cooperate with all the rival companies and shared throne with all of them, today it would have been as small as those rivals are now.

Hence, the prompt has put forward a ponderable statement which will garner enough arguments for and against it. Yet, one cannot deny that in today's already very competitive world of information and technology, cooperation is what a lot of leaders need to be instilled of, in order to make themselves successful.