Base Your Strategies on Collaboration; not Competition
Bruce Holland
![Bruce Holland]()
Bruce Holland
Organizational Expert specializing in Strategy, Culture and Leadership Development. Increasing focus & energy throughout
Most strategies assume that competition is the natural order; therefore they include an extensive analysis of each major competitor. Actually, collaboration is a more powerful force. Competition is great when you are trying to improve yourself; but, not when you are trying to beat others; especially others within your organisation. Today’s organisational problems are seldom technical, they are nearly all based on poor human relationships that result from too much focus on competition where it should be collaboration. We seem to sublimate much of our human nature in the workplace. What we find is power, ego, separation and fear dominating over care, love and cooperation.
Narrowing the gap between strategy and operations.
4 年Re Collaboration / Competition Assessing external collaboration potential, in my view, quickly requires analysis of the 'competition' - if you want partner or acquire, the candidates will either be organizations already in your line of business (i.e. on your list of competitors) or candidates that would potentially allow your organization to diversify on acquisition.. Internal collaboration and cooperation within complex organizations is best achieved by the introduction of workflow/workload methods, tools, platforms. These methods, tools, platforms have recently upscaled from "a good idea" to "essential for survival" in the case of WHF (work from home) teams.
ORTimes.org - Healthcare: Expert integration of data, risk management, and clinical, finance; 25+yr MD- Anesthesia & ICU; 2yr MBA: Risk mgmt, Data mgmt, Finance mgmt; TOC, Lean, 6sigma
4 年Humans evolved (competed with nature and each other) as tribes, a collection of individuals that as a group were successful: The risk taker (need plenty of them as they die frequently); the critical thinker and creator; the nurturer; the hunter; the fighter, the peacemaker, the collaborators, the experimenter, etc.. As a group of disparate individuals, with complementary talents and predispositions, they had a greater chance of survival in our small environments. We're not ants, we're not clones, and our dna mixing with each offspring seemingly worked well up until now. As for long term survival, we got ahead of ourselves in colonizing and effecting the entire world instead of just our local jungle. The critical thinkers and collaborators are now up at bat.
Experienced Change and Interim manager for Hospitals, Insurance and Government
4 年Hi Bruce, Thank you for your remarks about what people of find 'natural'For those who assume that competition is the natural order, it might be interesting (or should I say too complex) to learn more about biology and behavior of other animal species. Animals living in flocks, might somtimes compete with other flocks, but the goal is always to stop that competition when a flock has gathered all it needs. As far as I know there are no species (except humans) who gather much more than what they will (ever) need. In other situations ‘competing’ flocks may even cooperate. Within these flocks there is usually a changing leadership, depending on the task ahead of the flock. ‘Leadership” goes to the animal which is smartest or best equiped for the role at hand. Leadership changes when there are reasons to change roles. Some member of the flock for example may be very good in impressing or even frighten others and when necessary takes this role. However mostly this animal is not capable of fullfilling any other role. That’s why animals in flocks cooperate.