From time to time businesses conduct strategic audits to ensure they are better aligned for growth or simply, and probably more often, they merely respond to disruption and challenges. Increasingly there is a focus on collaboration, or lack of it as is the most often the case. No […]
The business world is interesting for a whole host of reasons. How businesses approach collaboration as a strategy is one of them. Why some businesses still struggle and remain unsure about collaboration as a business driver, while others enter into 10 year-long collaborations, is a bit of a […]
There is no shortage of people who say they want to collaborate. Nor is there any shortage of people professing they know how to do it well. The slight problem is that a lot of collaboration talk is ‘over the counter’ grade quality. Collaboration is a genuine business […]
The staying power of collaboration as a business strategy is a powerful reminder to business leaders that a truly competitive business can’t really ignore collaboration any more than it can its ICT, Marketing and Comms or HR strategies. Two very commonly observed factors that prevent some from embracing […]
Silos are good for storing grain … or guided long-range missiles. They are expensive and valued structures that make sense if your primary concern is food safety or warfare. But when we build them in our workplace, they are nothing more than a major cost to business. There […]
Clients are not what they used to be. While the idea of a client as someone who wants their needs met has not changed over decades or centuries, what has changed is how well clients understand their needs and, more importantly, communicate them. I recall a conversation with […]
When we consider collaboration, productivity matters a lot. Whichever way we look at it there is no escaping the fact that poor, albeit well meaning, collaboration can be costly. This issue can be tackled but it does take one specific bent; understanding that collaboration is about smart strategy […]
Business collaboration started off as a necessity for some industries. It slowly become a clever competitive strategy, then a norm. Businesses that get collaboration also get the fact that collaboration is not a real choice; sloppy collaboration is a cost no business can sustain. Some are learning this […]
“Collaboration is good business”. So asserts Forbes’ contributor Erica Dhawan in “The Secret Weapon For Collaboration”; an article that is included this edition of recommended reading. That simple message is worth repeating as we know that collaboration thrives when the right culture is in place. And, as with […]
The hype surrounding the start-up culture that has gripped western economies over the past decade or so has become a de facto yardstick for any kind of achievement. Essentially, one struggles to find enough people to understand that not all businesses should be built upon the start-up model; […]
Every year various major business consulting firms or some such influencers issue a list of emerging jobs or jobs that will be future professions. Many are quite entertaining, for instance; Simplicity Expert, Robot Counsellor, Head Monster, Locationists, Privacy Manager and so on. In most cases they are not […]
On any given day, I am to likely hear an argument pointing to the challenges of collaboration. There are many. Some of the challenges are genuine and others tend rather to be excuses. A fairly straightforward analysis of any business that resists collaboration usually uncovers factors that point […]
It’s been a long time since the word ‘silo’ was fashionable. It normally gets a bad rap. When we talk about collaboration then it is even more so the case. But it is important not to overdo it by assuming that silos are always a bad thing in […]
People obsess about many things – it’s part of what makes us human I guess. One of those obsessions is with definitions. For some reason we seem to have a never-ending desire to define things before we do anything else. And so it is with collaboration. I often […]
Chances are that one can be a bit tired of hearing about collaboration these days. The word is on everyone’s lips. And yet there’s always something new happening. New collaborative solutions spring up all the time. More surveys and research are revealing the good and the challenging sides […]
Collaboration makes some people uneasy. That then can easily translate into defensive behaviour, as people generally tend to rationalise their feelings. And then things are likely to snowball into something you can call anything under the sun except collaboration. But frankly it’s still early days with regard to […]
Collaboration is as much about shared value creation as it is about innovation and disruption. The mix of these factors is not easy to come to terms with for the savviest of managers, let alone the conservatively educated ones who still adhere to last century’s management textbooks. There’s […]
Police and lawyers tell us that you can’t solve a crime without knowing the motivation behind it. A ‘no motive no crime’ sort of logic. Businesses can’t work without a motive either. And the same goes for collaboration. I would not suggest that collaboration enthusiasts befriend a criminal […]
Any business seriously attracted to the idea of collaboration in its workplace inevitably reaches a point where it has to answer some very hard questions; the most obvious being how they intend to make collaboration work. It’s all well and good to think that if staff are invited […]
Advanced research in the collaboration discipline is still in its infancy. There is still a lot that we do not know. So much about collaboration is still done on a hunch or a guesstimate and, more or less, that is how many well-established disciplines started before becoming fine-tuned […]
There was a time in business history when collaboration was only for the brave. It was also for business connoisseurs; those prepared to try things others could not even imagine. Today, collaboration is mainstream, notwithstanding the fact that we still have a long way to go in reaching […]
Most people have heard about collaboration. In fact, the majority of senior business leaders, executives and managers probably bombard their employees with messages extolling the virtues of collaboration. And therein lies a slight problem, as with all change management that comes from authority. Making things slightly more complicated […]
If you had a major stake in a business, would you employ someone who is not engaged with the role they are applying for? The bleeding obvious answer would seem to be a big fat NO. However, the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of employees are […]
Anyone who has collaborated would have experienced some mistakes. What are the mistakes we commonly make in collaboration; particularly in intra-organisational collaboration? While the long list of candidates for the easiest and costliest collaboration mistakes is worth addressing in full, this week I have chosen the simples one […]
There is no doubt that collaboration is a buzzword. Unfortunately though, for some that is all there is to it. But on the flip side, many more will make the best of it. Collaboration as a discipline is still in an early phase of development and is finding […]
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