It is my opinion, both personally and professionally, that collaboration is the way that the world economies will pull through this difficult time. Why do I say this? It is simple. Collaboration will reveal to each of us that we do not depend upon large “iconic” companies like General Motors or Coca-Cola to survive. In other words, humanity is capable of leading its own path where smaller groups of people make decisions and help each other out. I am impressed with President Obama’s stimulus package, but at the same time, I worry about its implications for the future down the road.

The long term solution for humanity at the economic level is collaboration. We need to look at things with a smaller economy of scale. For example, if I have the money to hire a housekeeper, then I should do that. If I need to hire a babysitter, then I should do that. Why?

Because I am giving people work. They are rendering a needed service and I will be paying them for that service. Then, this money received by the housekeeper and babysitter will be spent in other sectors of the local economy. So, if we all embrace this attitude, then money will again circulate and the economy will circulate once again, but from the bottom-up, that is, amongst the people itself.

Man bears the scars of centuries of what you might call extreme capitalism that is rooted back in slavery, as far back as the Egyptian civilization. Then, people (slaves) were forced to work and paid virtually nothing. Over the centuries, fortunately, this economic tyranny has subsided and finally with the emergence of the Internet, true collaboration and cooperation among people – person to person – is now possible. As an example, the individual who designed this website for me lives in Montreal, Canada and I met him through another friend who had helped me with another web project of mine. I did not hire some big mega corporation to design my website. See? It is this emergence that is what will break the chains of large corporations. They simply cannot survive when change happens quickly. Only smaller groups of people will be able to adapt quickly to change and offer needed services to the emerging world economies.

Here is what Wikipedia says about collaboration.

“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals – for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature – by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Collaboration does not require leadership and can sometimes bring better results through decentralization and egalitarianism.

In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources. Collaboration is also present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration, though this notion is atypical of the annotation that people have given towards their understanding of collaboration.

Structured methods of collaboration encourage introspection of behavior and communication. These methods specifically aim to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving. Forms, rubrics, charts and graphs are useful in these situations to objectively document personal traits with the goal of improving performance in current and future projects.”

All The Best,

Keith

Disclaimer: Keith Johnson is not a business consultant in any way. This web post is not advice and is not to be read as advice in any way. This blog post is simply the conjecture of Keith Johnson as a Technical Writer, and nothing more. Keith Johnson shall be held liable in no way for any reason, should anyone decide to act upon the information stated in this blog post. Thank you.