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 pretty fast without integrating collaboration into their business growth strategy.

What is interesting to note is how complex challenges tend to motivate managers to think about collaboration in a new light. COVID 19 is a case in point. Here in Australia we witnessed the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), ‘encourage’ banks to collaborate to ensure better support to businesses impacted by the COVID 19 disruption. Ordinarily, these kinds of scenarios would attract attention for what could be construed as potential collusion. 

Complex disruptions are disturbing more than business processes. They are also posing deeper questions, such as business resilience and the role of business collaboration in the face of major challenges. Collaboration is equally about resilience and competition. The current disruption offers renewed opportunity for businesses to realise that, just as businesses cannot hope to function without good marketing strategies, nor can they remain relevant without good collaboration strategies. To help steer thoughts in that direction, here is this week’s selection of recommended readings. 

How Creative Collaboration Can Help Nonprofits Survive And Thrive

One sign of long-term sustainability and success within a sector is a healthy distribution or ecosystem of organizations along the spectrum of size. The Portland area for example is home to a wide variety of arts organizations, but those groups can almost entirely be defined as either large anchor institutions or small startup groups serving niche audiences. There are very few midsize organizations. The initial reaction to the current spread in an area like Portland can be either to invest heavily in a number of small organizations to help them transition to the midsize level or identify groups with a similar focus to merge, creating a single, larger group…READ ON

7 Strategies to Tame Collaboration Complexity

Over the past few years, the software that organizations use to create content and collaborate has grown in complexity, as have the corresponding compliance and privacy regulations.

Gone are the days of attaching a file to an email and sending it off without another thought. That’s marks an important evolution in security, data loss prevention, and privacy — but it puts a burden on both end users and IT…READ ON

Give Your Remote Team Unstructured Time for Collaboration

After more than six months of at least partial remote work for roughly a third of U.S. workers, managers have largely implemented the basic best practices for overseeing their remote workforces.

Now, as many companies are continuing to work remotely — and some are shifting to permanent WFH policies — many leaders realize that they need to develop new practices and habits to support their remote employees over the long term. Creating opportunities for employees to connect with one another is at the top of the list for many managers I speak with as part of my research and executive training…READ ON

5 Tips From the Experts on Making Remote Collaboration Work for Your Team

Remote collaboration, long a rising trend in global work habits, is now front-and-center as an essential component of modern work. With WFH seemingly here to stay in some capacity, the way we collaborate is also changing. At the beginning of the pandemic, monday.com’s State Of Remote Work report found that 69 percent of people were enjoying working from home more than they expected to, while 21 percent said their team was communicating more than they had before.

Along with many benefits like getting some extra sleep instead of commuting, collaborating remotely presents its own hurdles—for instance, keeping everyone in the loop and streamlining processes (not to mention getting out of your pajamas by noon, but we’re not keeping track). In 2020, we have seen just how flexible teams need to be to succeed in a rapidly changing workplace. Fortunately, the remote collaboration experts at monday.com have some tips to make your WFH teamwork thrive…

Biodiversity monitoring programmes need a culture of collaboration

Ecological monitoring is the recording of biological diversity and its spatial and temporal changes. The lack of monitoring programs which cover a broad range of species often means that, in many countries, no clear assessments can be made about the status of biodiversity. As a result, factors which may lead to declines cannot be identified and remedied…READ ON

Increased industry collaboration around resilience must continue

Coupled with this, and an area that has received less attention though is significant, is the increased and growing focus on resilience within firms. There is a growing mindset of collaboration that is driving deep change and maturity within industries including financial services, bringing together firms, ordinarily fierce competitors, to share insights and best practices on the risks to business and industry resiliency, including the challenges created by COVID-19, cyber threats and other areas of risk…READ ON

5 Practices for Collaboration and Partnership

Most of us in higher education IT roles are accustomed to thinking about our work as strategic and beneficial to the overall good functioning and core priorities of our institutions. That’s certainly true of our projects to improve major systems and services. Any effective CIO needs little prompting to state the top priorities the IT team is focusing on, at any given time, to keep the institution in a strong position with respect to information technology. But in an age of ever-increasing demands on technology and ambitious expectations for digital transformation, the what of our work is only half the story…READ ON