Collaboration or Competition? Share your opinion…

I want to offer to start using this space for businesses to share information and practices that could raise the standards for how we do business.  My intention is that through collaboration and sharing of knowledge we increase the chances of success.  What’s inspired me is as I have moved around the country in the last ten years I see pockets of success with certain parts of a business, and found that information to be valuable to other businesses.  That was the reason I founded a roundtable discussion and what has become a NARI chapter,  seven years ago – I found contractors very interested in what other GC’s where doing, and they didn’t have a way to easily discover that. 

There are a few challenges with this… One problem is getting the right information out fast enough to everyone that needs it in a way that could make it useful.  Another one is the idea many have about competition with others, making sharing what works for you seem like a really bad idea.  Another might be the fear and doubt people have about what really does work, what you can do and what you can’t – what works for one company may not work for another!  These are all valid concerns, and I intend to explore them one at a time and see what makes more sense – collaborate or compete?  Your thoughts and ideas are most welcome…

 

Introduction

    Welcome.  This is an invitation for you to join me exploring the current ideas and practices we use every day in business.  What I want to poke into and begin to challenge are those traditions handed down for the sake of tradition. In the process of this inquiry,  I hope to inspire some new ways of looking at how we conduct ourselves in business, how we communcate with each other, how we pass information, and how we manage each other.  And I think the best way to do this is by inviting any concerned about it into a conversation. 

None of us are smart as all of us -  “Old Japanese Proverb”

    I think that by exploring questions about building ethical and effective human business practices we can come to a much greater understanding for what that might look like, how we might go about making this happen in very practical and effecient ways, and what some of the obstacles are standing in our way.  I belong to one professional association, and attend several others.   I know I am not alone in the feeling and desire to improve current practices.  The question of what is really going to allow us to take new ground as a whole, as a community, will obviously not come from just one conversation, nor one single individual.