Collaboration As A Business Model: Limitless Possibility, Together
It is time to flip the script on the competitive business landscape and transform it into a collaborative model.
The notion that true success in business and in life can only be found by besting your rivals, blowing your competition out of the water, and capturing as much market share as possible is one that is equally tiresome as it is counter-productive.
As the global economy and international connectivity continue to reshape the endless possibilities and opportunities available to business leaders today, choosing to view others as collaborators instead of threats is essential in making our work towards climate justice more fulfilling and impactful.
Business 101
In the years before starting Trust, I had created a little business acumen book club with my brother-in-law, a recent MBA graduate. My desire to learn about running a successful business that can create impact fueled my interest in leadership, strategy, and organizational culture.
My brother-in-law and I began engaging in bi-weekly conversations, musings, and masterclasses in business. He provided me with articles, studies, and other periodicals that focused on strategy and finance. At the same time, I shared with him books on staff management and developing a growth mindset culture.
Throughout all the materials he provided me, one theme kept coming up: Competition was King, and success was built off of a cut-throat approach to running a business. That the best way to grow was to undercut your opponents and outperform your competition.
While I appreciated the guidance and information in these resources, I knew that this competitive framework was not the pathway to success I wanted to follow. As I worked for an organization committed to tackling climate change, I found myself asking the same question over and over:
“How do you compete in an industry when you desperately need your competitors to succeed, too?”
Collaboration as a business model
The concept of constantly eyeing the competitive landscape, hoarding resources, and engaging in cut-throat practices in order to stay one step ahead of others never sat well with me. For me, this ‘dog-eat-dog’ approach to business was flawed at best. Here are some of the shortcomings I’ve observed.
Scarcity Driven Echo Chambers: By believing that the pie shrinks or your value is threatened whenever someone else has a great idea can not only limit growth and innovation, it encourages others to keep all ideas internal out of fear.
Financial Tunnel Vision: When organizations only look at the next big win or hitting financial margins – they overlook externalities and the long-term impact those have. This could include the well-being of your staff, the environmental impact of your work, missing a new business opportunity by focusing on what has been profitable in the past.
Incompatibility With Solving The Climate Crisis: Climate change does not care about your competition or your market share. The damage continues, which means the longer we skirt away from our competition, the less is being done to meet the mission.
The reality is simple:
We cannot solve the climate crisis using the same business model that caused the problem in the first place.
It is time to embrace a collaborative model that allows us to go farther together.
““Accelerators” create the conditions for solutions to move forward”....”On both accelerators and solutions, efforts will be aided by connecting them through communication and collaboration; supporting continual learning through education, knowledge-building, and prototyping; and centering the experiences, wisdom, and solutions of impacted communities”
Building Trust
I want to flip the script on the competitive business landscape and transform it into a collaborative model.
In addition to my belief that collaborative work is critical to fostering change in this world, I also don’t want to do this work alone. President Barack Obama summed it up perfectly on Michelle Obama’s podcast:
“I think I figured out once I got to school that if I am chasing after my own success, that somehow, I am going to end up alone and unhappy. And that’s why I ended up going into community organizing and the work that I was doing because when I thought about how I was going to spend my life, what I looked at was what those civil right workers had done – and the freedom riders had done. And I thought, you know, that looks like hard work but it never looks like lonely work.”
This spoke to the core of what I want Trust to embody: Hard work that is never lonely.
I don’t want to look over my shoulder with fear, threatened by competition. I don’t want to live in an echo chamber. I don’t want the critical work I am passionate about to suffer because of my ego wanting to be ‘first’ or ‘best.’ I want to work with others who will help me identify my blind spots, collaborate and create incredible ideas, and move forward with this important work together – and I have a feeling that I’m not alone in this desire.
Embracing possibility
Today, Trust is helping other organizations thrive, grow, and innovate. Helping to change the climate landscape through collaboration as a business model. By embracing a collaborative process we are able to achieve the following:
Abundance Mindset: With each new collaboration comes new skills, views, and possibilities.
Larger Reach and Impact: Each of us has a circle of partners, collaborators, and associates who can help move our work forward – and when we team up, that circle expands exponentially.
Greater Resource Allocation: You can focus your energy on subjects you are an expert in while remaining confident that your partners are doubling down their efforts on what they are experts in. And with more eyes on a problem, solutions come faster.
Accelerated Impact and Growth: With all of these powerful components in play, the collaboration model allows organizations and businesses to go farther, faster, and more effectively than going it alone.
Out with the old, in with the collaboration
We have been ingrained with the belief that if we work alongside or help our competition, we are naïve and will be taken advantage of – but the reality is actually much more altruistic: Collaboration builds innovation and promotes industry-wide success.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals specifically call out the importance of collaboration in Goal 17, “Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.” The Drawdown Review makes a call out for “accelerators” who can aid connection and collaboration in this work.
“The achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals require all hands on deck. It require different sectors and actors working together in an integrated manner by pooling financial resources, knowledge and expertise.”
I was raised in a family where individualism and competition was everything - collaboration has been a muscle I have had to develop. It is now something I believe in fully - so much so that I have built my career around collaboration, and I’m here to say: I’m all in! I hope you are too.
