Collaborative Mindsets Transform Professions

A collaborative mindset is the best fuel ever to power-up.

Discovery of the year:? all professions have their own version of the Frozen Middle, but their own version of innovators and early adopters, too. If anything, this past week has shown me how much drama and controversy is rooted in fear of the unknown. Insecurity always makes us clench tighter, more conservative, more willing to rail against anything that threatens this tiny space of safety we’ve carved out for ourselves.? That translates to acquisition, but I needed to see it in other career fields to really have that point hammered home, how much fear plays a part in refusal to try anything new.

I just got back after a week in Vegas for a HUGE indie-author conference (aka 20BooksTo50k, which will morph next year into Author Nation), and I’m both exhausted and energized.? I couldn’t help—as always—but draw parallels between publishing and acquisition, especially when it comes to trying to squeeze more time out of production schedules.

This year was different for writers—and should be for acquisition pros, too.? No fluffy workshops on time management, and yet…and yet that theme came up again and again.? Just not those words.? Not “lead time” either.?? The concept was there, built in.? Faster, less work that’s not value-added, efficiency, effectiveness.

For the past year, I’ve watched a sharp divide in my writer friends, to the point where some of us aren’t speaking after 30 years of friendship because one side sees the other as cheaters and that other side sees them as ignorant. In publishing, this divide is causing some authors who are having a tough time in the industry right now to clamp down on their opinions and turn into witch-hunters. There are mobs—not too strong a word—of authors and their readers who are review-bombing authors who are AI-positive, actively trying to kill their careers. ?It’s downright dangerous to speak up. The more saturated the market, the more fear and the more drama as people look for the boogeyman and try to pin their worries on anyone with a different opinion or who is “other.”? Nothing new there, I suppose.? ?

But I’ve also found some wonderfully collaborative new friends who share innovations and ideas and tools – much as some of us in Acquisition do.? It’s a heady feeling to collaborate like that, sharing those new lessons learned, and I freakin’ love it.? LOVE it.

Those new collaborative friends are AI-positive, using various tools to save time and effort in their menial and mundane office chores, analysis, marketing plans, summaries, research, drafting newsletters and email campaigns, developing social media ads, etc. But it’s more than that.?? They’re using AI tools not just to save time but to spur new creativity, analyze trends, make business decisions, outline plots, create characters, craft new titles and cover mockups.? They are collaborating both with their AI tools and with their colleagues, sharing their best practices.?

(In some ways, this reminds me of using Other Transactions—come for the time savings, stay for the collaboration features.)

I hope my friends in Acquisition are thinking about how they can take advantage of all these tools—aligned to their own project security needs, of course—to ease some of the administrative burdens that consume their work hours but to explore new ways to collaborate as well.

#acquisition #contracting #FrozenMiddle #OtherTransactions #collaboration #AItools