Competition through collaboration
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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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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 […]
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“Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.” This is a famous insight by legendary American biologist E.O. Wilson which may likewise form the baseline of a good collaboration […]
Convincing your boss to collaborate
A couple of years ago researchers at Berkley published a paper titled “Failure at the Top: How Power Undermines Collaborative Performance” which concluded that when asked to collaborate “groups of high power individuals performed worse because they fought over their relative status in the group, were less focused […]
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“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 […]
Is Your Business Rigged To Avoid Collaboration?
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 […]
Collaboration reveals more than we know
What the rise of collaboration in the workplace and between business, universities, governments and other institutions reveals is not simply a human capacity to adapt to a particular set of business drivers. It is not a pure desire for financial riches that has made collaboration a vital part […]
I collaborate, therefore I am
Humans are tool-making animals. Our evolutionary story has, in the main, been defined by this single delineating feature of our species. While we now know that we are not the only living organisms that can craft things with our hands, or beaks or legs as the case may […]
Collaboration Starts at the Office
My conviction is shared with many colleagues globally who understand that the collaboration culture will be one, if not the defining, feature of work and sustainability by the end of this decade. Many will make a last ditch effort to join in, hoping that quick fix strategies will […]
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Collaboration in 2014: 10 Predictions Predicting the future is big business. It is also tricky. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting or engaging. As far as predictions in respect to collaboration go, this piece by David Coleman is definitely worth noting. Without spoiling the pleasure of […]
The Lucky Country Collaborates, Mr Horne
It is May 2014. I just sat down to have my first coffee and check the news of the day. I am keen to see what the 2014/15 Federal Government budget announcement will reveal. I find that an Office for Collaboration has been established and that it will […]
Collaboration produces a competitive advantage
Collaboration, as I argue continuously, provides a competitive advantage to enterprises across industries and sectors. The key to unlocking that competitive advantage is to better understand both the collaboration practice and your own enterprise’s position in the market. Effectively, this necessitates approaching collaboration as a strategy that can […]
Auteur Leadership: the best choice for collaborative organisations
Identifying the right opportunities for collaboration is often the most exciting part as it tends to be an area where everyone has an idea. Creative juices start to flow and excitement swells at the prospect of working on projects we have long dreamt of, and within a short space […]
There’s nothing like intensive collaborative learning: ROADMENDER Micro-workshop (Part 2 of 2)
Following on from the first part of this post (published last week), here are some of the resources that were shared at the micro-workshop, and which may be useful to the entire ROADMENDER network. What makes a good collaboration practitioner? I compiled this particular list based on some […]
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