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June 30, 2005

Cooperation in Business

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Posted by Elizabeth Albrycht

The Institute for the Future recently released a report called Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business (pdf download). Authors are Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Kathi Vian. Pulling from work on cooperation from a wide variety of disciplinary fields, including economics, sociology, biology and mathmatics, the authors seek to provide some guidance on the value of cooperation and how organizations can shift from a competitive model to cooperative strategies for business. They write:


Connective and pervasive technologies are enabling new forms of human and machine interactions and relationships; they will present business institutions with a host of new possibilities for organizing people, processes, relationships and knowledge. These forces will accelerate a shift in business strategy from solving concrete business problems to managing complex business dilemmas, which in turn will require a broader set of strategic tools and concepts than are provided by competitive models. (1)[my emphasis]

This idea of moving from a focus on "solving" to "managing" is rather interesting, because I think it moves us away from the forced oversimplification that a focus on "solving" a problem can bring.

When I read this introduction, I visualized a SWOT analysis chart for some reason. Or a PowerPoint slide that reduces complexity to a series of bullets that could be used in any company's charts:

1) Beat the competition
2) Become a thought leader
3) Support our V.A.L.U.E.S:
-- Vigor
-- Aggressiveness
-- Likeability
-- Usability
-- Excellence
-- Sensibility

And blah blah blah, and may I say "Duh!"

What I really like about the idea of "managing complex business dilemmas" is that it builds in the need for cooperation. The CEO can't dictate an answer here. Consensus building is the name of the game.

The authors of this report aren't pretending to have all the answers, nor are they trying to provide "tools for engineering." Rather, they are providing "tools for understanding," a starting point for people who are trying to better understand how cooperation can work for business.

Taking them at their word, I began to uncover what these "tools for understanding" might mean for the practice of communications. You can read my attempt here.

It is time for us to start looking behind the buzzwords of "cooperation" and "community building" and "authenticity" and "transparency" -- all of those concepts that are being tossed around the blogosphere as we try to develop an alternative to the old command/control hierarchies -- and begin getting more specific about what they mean for various business discplines. We need to answer questions such as: What models does this new way of thinking require? What changes do we need to make in the way we work? This report is a good step in providing us with some references, ideas and tools to help us start to answer these questions.

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