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Fruitful collaboration

Jul 17th

Cooperation is a vital ingredient for a successful business – although it’s easier said than done. While everyone knows collaboration is a key business capability and signs up to it in principle, it’s certainly not easy to achieve in practice.

By Beatrice Hollyer, Management Today Entrepreneur Weekly

Beatrice Hollyer of Stanton Marris says cooperation is a vital ingredient for a successful business – although it’s easier said than done.
Aside from the excitement following the recent election, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King had a deeper message about putting politics second to an urgent need for global cooperation:
We need to balance demand around the world economy so as not to end up with a downturn in the world economy … the real need is world rebalancing measures, of which fiscal consolidation is a part.’

This, he said, could only be achieved by working together on a global scale, through the IMF and G20. It also echoed the priority our clients constantly give to the need to improve collaboration across their organisations, to achieve more innovation, better decisions, more effective engagement and communication and more efficient systems and processes. How many businesses do you know with the word ‘collaborative’ in their set of values? In my experience, there are dozens.

And yet, it’s one of those organisational goals that sometimes seems to run counter to human instincts. As we often say, ‘easy to understand – hard to do’. While everyone signs up to collaboration in principle, it’s certainly not easy to achieve in practice, as our clients tell us. There are always a thousand reasons why it comes more naturally to work with the people in your immediate team than the team on the next floor, or on another site…

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This article is filed under: business capability, organisation, organisation design

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