Is Competition or Collaboration the Key to Success On and Off the Court?

Leslie Grossman, author of LINK OUT: How to Turn Your Network into a Chain of Lasting Connections, wonders if she may be obsessed with collaboration and reveals that in fact there is an increasing number of like-minded people.  Many have devoted a significant amount of time to better understanding this new discipline and have crafted sophisticated arguments that ROADMENDER is very excited about.  This article is about John Howard’s vision for a mixed gender basketball league.  Howard has had a long career in education and is, at least to me, prophetic with his vision of the potential of collaboration in sport.  READ ON…

IVCi created this infographic to highlight the many forms that collaboration can take, what some of the benefits are, where collaboration happens and the tools available.

80% Of Companies Don’t Care About Company Culture–Do You?

Sobering? Frustrating? Frightening? Maybe all the above and a bit more?  In any case this is not a statistic that can be ignored.  Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland unpack organisational culture in light of the revealing statistic and explain what it takes to be a DEO (Design Executive Officer) of the future.  As I would expect of any emerging discipline, in the field of leadership and senior management collaboration would feature prominently as a logical part of any resilient and competitive organisation.  Maria and Christopher make a precise point about this as they argue that a DEO “wants a philosophy that encourages collaboration and rewards useful risk-taking”.  READ ON…

Trimming the stupid from management plans

It is not unusual to hear managers, business, political or community leaders turn off at first mention of words such as collaboration.  Some develop a disliking for any terms that seem to be buzzwords.  Buzzword or not, The Chicago Tribune’s Rex Huppke explains that it is worth staying with the concept and not be abrupt in dismissing ideas purely because they are mentioned often.  The author charts a range of diverse pathways involving collaboration and/or innovation in business, referencing some very interesting and emergent thinking.  Some of these, as one would have assumed, seem straightforward.  Are there managers who still do not get the idea that one has to measure things in order to know if they work?  Huppke also introduces us to a consulting firm that has come up with a new concept – ‘de-stupidication’ – as well as their ‘Collaborative Culture Index’. READ ON…

What Happened to Collaboration?

This piece by Lora Cecere and published on Forbes, is an interesting take on the state of supply chain management and collaboration.  Cecere asks, ‘What happened to supply chain collaboration?’ and goes on to argue that despite all the talk about collaboration, which is supposed to move things further, the supply chain has in fact gone backwards.  Her analysis is interesting for a number of reasons uncovered by her research.  One of the key points she makes is that companies, the majority of them in fact, are stuck because they are ‘not able to drive improvements year-over-year on operating margin and inventory turns’.  READ ON…

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