Collaborative Advantage – From “Yes we can” to “Yes we will”
Welcome to the Collaborative Advantage blog.
President Bush represents the last vestige of the concept of Competitive Advantage. That is an idea whose time has come and gone. With President Obama a new dawn of Collaborative Advantage has arrived. He knows that the to succeed, much less survive, we need to be greater than the sum of our parts. This can only be done through collaboration. Competitive thinking and acting in a “flat world” with immediate access to the Internet can only lead to us being less than the sum of our parts.
This blog will be an occasional blog for both myself and people who want to contribute and collaborate on solutions to problems and challenges we all face.
It will have a particular format to give it consistency. Here are what I see as the necessary steps in that process, but welcome any and all comments to refine it, edit it or even trash it and replace it with something that is more doable.
1. A concise and clear goal. One described in visualizable (seeing is achieving) detail and describes explicitly a future that the people it affects will want to be a part of and want to make happen. It must be fair and reasonable and not disadvantageous to anyone it affects or impacts. For example, since we all love our children, we have a responsibility to helping provide a world that their children and our grandchildren will be born into where they have the best chance for effort and merit based success and prosperity, access to education and training that will enable them to succeed and prosper, health care, and freedom from war or terrorism.
2. A strategy that makes sense, feels right and is doable. It makes sense in that it rationally seems like it will get us to that goal/vision; feels intuitively correct; and seems like something doable under the dictum: “If is doable only by geniuses and not by mere mortals, it will never get done” (I credit my brother Noel Goulston with that gem). For example, the strategy might be to reach a consensual agreement on what that world will need to look like for our grandchildren to enter it with all the realistic possibilities laid out in 1 above. After we reach agreement on what that looks like, we then reverse engineer from it to the present as the correct strategy followed by the correct personnel and tactics to make it happen.
3. A track record of it already having worked. If you offer a solution to a problem, please only offer one if you have already used it and it produced a positive measurable result towards a desired goal. Believing you can do something is of course important, but as important is what you have already done that worked. That is what gives you and your solution credibility. For example, if you have already been able to articulate a clear noble goal such as the one offered above, what did you actually do to get it done?
I look forward in our forming a collaborative community where we can go from “Yes we can” to “Yes we will.” But as President-elect Obama has said, “I need your help” to do that.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Kudos to you Mark, for launching this community.
From “can” to “will” means we need methods that enable us to accomplish more together than we can on our own.
Those methods abound around us and, as each of us create or hear of one, try it, hone it and share it we are more likely to create the momentum to attract others to this mindset, telling others and to launching an action – with others.
As a former journalist I frequently saw well-intended people fail or not accomplish as much as they intended because of two key things:
not having the best method and/or not attracting the right partners.
Your work here can help us discover fresh ways to collaborate.
Ironically Communicate to Collaborate is Cisco’s internal theme this quarter, the name of my most-requested presentation and the goal of my blog, Moving From Me to We.
Also consider sharing methods and success stories there.
When we bring out the best in each other we can become high-performing and happier together. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.
In a civilization when love is
gone we turn to justice and when
justice is gone we turn to power
and when power is gone we
turn to violence.
Opportunity is often inconvenient.
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November 26th, 2008 at 10:28 am
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December 20th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
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