Our Passion Is Collaboration

In the course of working with companies for over two decades, the most important component we have found is collaboration. Every challenge that occurs at the individual, team, department, division, or organizational level can be traced to some failure to collaborate. The cost of this is enormous. It is big enough to shift the balance sheet of any company and big enough to balance the budget of a state or a nation. It could alter the balance of the entire world economy.

Human beings have become the dominant species on the planet because of their superior ability to collaborate. We rarely consider what it has taken by the efforts of millions of people in many countries around the world, to perform the simple act of squeezing a patch of toothpaste on our toothbrush in the morning. Yet we take these efforts for granted and focus on the conflicts in the news and entertainment media, then use all of this input to increase our capacity to compete against each other every day. We have found that the human spirit is built for collaboration but our human nature is geared for competition. One is not better than the other. Both must work together. When they do great success is achieved at all levels. When they are out of balance, which they usually are, the results are devastating to individuals, destructive to teams, and detrimental to the best interest of an organization.

Our passion is helping companies unleash this latent power of collaboration from within their organization and help them put it to work effectively. This power is barely tapped and often buried under a thick layer of counterproductive  internal competition. It is a wonder that much of anything gets produced. The gauntlet of competitive behavior that that patch of toothpaste must overcome is beyond comprehension. Before we get into how to unleashing the power of collaboration, let’s first look at the daily dose of competition that most people have to deal with: