Competition through collaboration
Urban Agriculture And Politics Of Space: Potential for Collaboration
Urban agriculture as one of the oldest activities in human history, has experienced a renaissance in the past two decades. Predictions made only a decade ago that UA will become a global reality as much as global necessity have proved to be accurate. Those predictions are reflected in […]
What makes collaborating teams tick?
On the surface everyone is a collaborator, and every team is a collaborating team. That is the ‘sell’ in contemporary workplaces. Businesses invest in collaboration as a part of their business strategy for a variety of reasons; improving organisational culture, trust, productivity, competitiveness or even, more imaginatively, to […]
Learning and failing
Houston (Texas) was recently ranked third on a list of ‘cities of the future’, based on its economic and human capital potential. However, only a few years ago the city was affected by a ‘1 in 500 year flood’ three years in row. The quick succession of these […]
De-risking collaboration
While collaboration has often been praised and promoted as a cure all, endorsing it in this way borders on irresponsible. In business there are no easy, fail-safe ways of finding good business solutions to complex problems, designing winning strategies or delivering results that meet everyone’s expectations. The appeal […]
Reclaiming collaboration
It’s time to wrest the subtle art of collaboration from the jaws of everyday spin. The famous co-founder of once widely popular start-up WeWork claimed that the majority (70%) of those who paid to use the WeWork shared space collaborated. This always seemed like a possibility given that […]
Collaboration: newspeak, a euphemism or a real deal
We’re nearly at the 2-year mark since COVID 19 disrupted our universe. Businesses have learnt many lessons, and many have embraced new strategies such as collaboration, even with competitors. In fact, competitors tend to embrace collaboration with each other more often than is recognised. This is not surprising […]
Collaboration has always been risky
A recent global collaboration study of 476 organisations found that nearly 70% have used collaboration apps. Reliance on collaboration tools continues to increase as more companies use apps to support their business. With that shift in workplace practice, or rather, scaling up of an existing practice, comes an […]
Collaboration technology does not make one a good collaborator
The most influential photographers in the history of the medium (almost 200 years) created pictures, iconic pictures in fact, with cameras and technology that were well below the standard of cameras one can buy today. Nowadays, everyone can access cameras that are superior to, for example, that used […]
Joining forces with your fiercest competitor
While not a new idea, competitor collaboration has become one of the central tenets of business strategy. The thinking behind this is twofold; businesses must consider expanding their circle of potential collaborating partners by joining forces with their biggest competitors, and, even if a business remains committed to […]
What to Do When Your Collaboration Textbook Doesn’t Have All the Answers
There is an abundance of excellent advice about the way collaboration can work, both internally and externally, and which can genuinely make a noticeable difference to any enterprise that appreciates the positive impact of collaboration. For the past couple of decades, collaboration has been researched and applied with […]
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Can a business be serious and ignore collaboration? That is a question I have in mind often when dealing with virtually any enterprise, regardless of circumstances. It is not so much about a right or wrong answer, as much as it is about the way it is answered […]
Why ‘talent walks’ and how workplace collaboration can change that
Unhappy staff leave their employers. The more talented your employee is, the more likely they will migrate to your competition if they are not fully engaged at work. Talent loss is a serious risk to business. Now, there are many strategies that can mitigate that risk. Sometimes they […]
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Start any conversation on business collaboration and pretty soon it will generate a common question; can competitors collaborate. My own consultancy is based on a firm conviction rooted in firsthand experience that the answer is affirmative. Going a step further, competitors soon realise their competitive edge gets blunt […]
Unlocking the Key to Collaboration
Dr Britt Andreatta, former Chief Learning Officer for LinkedIn Learning (previously Lynda.com) and consultant to Fortune 500 companies considers collaboration to be an essential skill. In her book Wired To Connect, Dr Andreatta argues that “Collaboration is a vital necessity for the success of today’s organisation and yet […]
When ‘good enough’ is not enough
Collaboration, like virtually every aspect of business strategy and performance, has elements that are deceptively simple. In the case of everyday collaboration, what often remains completely unobserved is the fact that simple, transactional engagement and information sharing between parties does not lead to the best that collaboration offers […]
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A collaborative culture in any enterprise allows for the mediated design of a trusted environment (or at the very least, trust-building environment). Collaboration in any organisation allows for creation of a culture which offers employees the ability to create new meaning which is an essential form of motivation […]
Collaboration in the ‘century of complexity’
Listen to this article (5 mins) “I think the next century will be the century of complexity.” That was the response Stephen Hawking gave to a journalist at the dawn of this century in January 2000. One fifth of the century in and we have seen plenty of […]
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2020’s mega disruption is already posing a major question to the business community – what is the best way to recover? As far as business recovery goes, there is no off-the-shelf formula, no silver bullet, no magic forecast. Strategy will be the key. One of the serious contenders […]
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The fallout from this year’s pandemic is yet to be fully ascertained. The long trail of damage it has caused will provide lessons that will invariably be critical for all forms of organised life, whether that be a local community or a city or a business or government. […]
5 Tricky Collaboration Problems and How To Fix Them
A recent business survey found that businesses which merely manage to survive tend to be stuck in going it alone, while those that are highly collaborative are more likely to see revenue growth. Increasingly, businesses are clear on the role of collaboration as a strategy of growth through […]
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Unless you have been living under a rock for the last 3 months you would have noticed that the word ‘collaboration’ has been buzzing around at record highs. We have seen the largest, rapid, workforce shift in recent times, which has resulted in an unprecedented growth in demand […]
Psychoanalysing collaboration
[5 minute read] Technology that enables people to work together is essential. And the more intuitively it is designed, the more effective it is. There is seemingly an exponential proliferation of tools that are branded ‘collaboration’ which promise a world of benefits. COVID-19 has also played an additional […]
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COVID 19 has disrupted everything. And, interestingly, one specific thing that has been disturbed is the corrosive cynicism of collaboration as a valuable business strategy. The crisis brought by the global pandemic has led us to rethink the capacity of collaboration as a response to the pervasive nature […]
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