Competition through collaboration
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 […]
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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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 […]
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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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. […]

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One can never have too much of a good thing. And knowing a good thing when you see it is a good thing in itself. Collaboration with a strategic purpose is a good thing for the willing and those paying attention to the simple fact that businesses are […]

Culture of Innovation [Infographic by Villanova University School of Business]
ROADMENDER is pleased to share this recently created infographic produced and supplied by our guest blog contributor Jay Taylor and team from Pearson Education and Villanova University School of Business titled “Creating A Culture of Innovation in Business“. The infographic details why successful companies consider as an integral part […]

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A quick survey of works about collaboration indicates that there has been a fivefold increase in published books every decade over the past 25 odd years. The clear conclusion is that collaboration is a topic of increasing significance. The interesting thing is that, as a way of work, […]

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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 […]

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This week’s selection of recommended reading makes a lengthy list. I found each article very interesting. But, if I had to choose the one as a must-read then it would be the ‘Collaboration key to innovation’. It really is a great piece by Professor Ian Jacobs, Vice-Chancellor of […]

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It is ok to say ‘no’ to collaboration. (Pop music mega star Adele created a bit of a buzz recently with her refusal to collaborate with another star, Beyonce. Some say it wasn’t true, thus the buzz.) But before we say ‘no’ we should know why, and our […]

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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 […]

Why Nobody Can Afford To Be Complacent, Arrogant, Or Go It Alone (Guest Author)
By Simone Novello, Managing Director of Partner2GROW, 52% of businesses on the Fortune 500 list in 2000 are gone (UpStart Business Journal June 4 2015). Nobody can afford to be complacent, arrogant, or go it alone. Creative disruption presents enormous opportunities for businesses of all sizes, but those […]

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Fashion is fun. Great fun for many. But above all it is one of the most competitive industries. It is also one of the industries that thrives on collaboration. In fact, given endless fast paced trend changes and the fickle nature of consumer interests, it would be almost […]

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ROADMENDER is 100% about collaboration. It is normal then that it continuously builds a case for businesses to adopt the practice as a vital element of competitive and sustainable enterprise. This particular site, with appreciation to the ROADMENDER community for its input, has accumulated a possibly unprecedented amount […]

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Some say that a spider’s silk is one of the strongest materials known to humankind. Diamonds are another amazingly strong material. I wonder if perhaps one of the strongest intangible materials might be collaboration. Judging by the current Russo-American collaboration in space, i.e. the International Space Station (ISS), […]

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Collaboration is a bit of a buzzword right now. But until one starts to delve deeper into all the facets of collaboration, it is hard to appreciate how much the ‘buzz’ is in fact much more than that. In this week’s dispatch of ROADMENDER Recommends you can appreciate […]

Collaboration vs Cooperation: is the proposition real?
Writing about collaboration, educating people through workshops, strategic planning sessions and so on inevitably creates opportunities for learning new things and, perhaps more importantly, thinking about new challenges and questions posed by clients and audiences. One of the interesting questions I am often asked is how collaboration differs […]

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Innovation in Social Collaboration: What’s Next for Businesses in 2014? Caroline Lyle from Streetwise Media argues that “as social collaboration continues to permeate today’s workplace, the future of business is looking bright”, and I tend to see the sense in that. I believe that the future of workforces […]

Capacity building and collaboration
The obsession, well I can’t find a better word, with capacity building as a way to fix social problems has become a political dogma. We fear any attempt to innovate our approaches so much that it could almost be career suicide to attempt to explore, let alone argue […]