Collaboration

Secret to winning: Forming alliances

April 19, 2012
In what may become a unifying theory of human behavior, biologist E.O. Wilson is positing a theory that “individual selection,” or competition to thrive and pass along one’s genes, inevitably loses out to “group selection.” Forming alliances has become a fundamental human trait, he says, because “it is a good way to win.”

Making music, not fame

March 22, 2012
Guitar hero Brad Paisley admits that he sometimes finds it hard to relate to young musicians who move to Nashville primarily for fame and fortune. “As I’ve come to understand it, making music isn’t about competition,” he says. “It’s about collaboration. I am a player. And I play with people, not against them.”

Networking a web of talent

March 12, 2012
You may be LinkedIn, but is the talent within your organization linked? When talent can more easily collaborate—and when workers know how to tap into one another’s strengths—the whole organization benefits. Here’s what it looks like in action:

Fight the time suck of collaboration

November 22, 2011

In your role as a leader, working with people is essential, and it takes time. And sometimes, you might be asked to help with something that’s a priority for others, but not for you. The question, says Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, boils down to this: How can we spend time where we add the most value and let go of the rest?

The secret to great partnerships

October 25, 2011
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard have made plenty of terrific movies, including “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13.” Their secret, says former Disney CEO Michael Eisner in his book about partnerships, is freedom from being in lock step.

Maybe it’s time for a breakfast club

September 28, 2011
Four British men together led the scientific world in the early 1800s through a simple device: by meeting every Sunday morning over breakfast to talk about science. The men aimed to launch a new scientific revolution—and they pretty much did. Lesson: Bring together your peers to brainstorm on a regular basis.

Collaborate like Edison

August 25, 2011
Author Sarah Miller Caldicott, great-grandniece of the inventor, is working on a second book about Thomas Edison’s collaboration methods. Edison believed in collaboration not only as a way of accelerating the innovation process, but to expand the solution set, Caldicott says. He liked to create diverse groups of people from diverse disciplines.

When collaboration fails, you fail!

March 11, 2011

After last year’s salmonella outbreak, in which thousands became ill after eating contaminated eggs, a billion of them were pulled from stores. Much of the blame was attributed to poor federal oversight and lack of coordination across federal agencies.

Mick, Keith shine a light

March 7, 2011

Despite their tumultuous relationship, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards decided in 1989 to thrash out how they would hold their band together. Why? Because they were better together than apart.

Enhance your R&D

October 26, 2010

One way you can increase productivity of knowledge workers is by breaking down time barriers. That is, build in time for them to share knowledge. Example: Boston-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals discovered that researchers didn’t have time to share lessons from experiments. So it dubbed a small group of scientists “knowledge intermediaries.”