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BMW and Toyota have collaborated in the area of sharing costs and knowledge for electric car battery research, despite the fact that both compete in the luxury car segment. In fact, they have a history of collaborating with each other.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a collaborative research consortium comprised of investigators around the world in order to speed up HIV vaccine development.

Be clear about what you are collaborating on. Set boundaries for collaboration at the beginning.Have a limited and well-defined purpose for the collaboration.Be clear about use and ownership of existing and jointly-created intellectual property.Depending on the situation, you may need to involve legal counsel. Collaborating with other firms, even competitors, may be what is needed to help both parties advance and improve. Be open to the possibilities, yet clear about the boundaries.

Dr. Rohini Anand, Chief Diversity Officer, Sodexo Ron Glover, Chief Diversity Officer, IBM Kathy Hannan, National Managing Partner, Diversity & Corporate Responsibility, KPMG LLP

Make it Real or Lose Your Authenticity

Executives are Still Short-Sided

Keeping Your Skill Set Current Can Be Key to Keeping Your Job Small and midsize companies can’t afford to not keep up with technology, and neither can enterprise-level companies. This past fall, IBM notified employees, who it had determined needed additional training, they were required to step up their technological game, and that they would receive only 90% of their salary while embarking upon this additional training. Talk about an incentive to stay on top of changes in technology ! According to the article in the New York Times covering this move, some IBM workers received an email letting them know that an assessment had determined certain members of the team had “not kept pace with acquiring the skills and expertise needed to address changing client needs, technology and market requirements.” While some criticized the move, the reality is that employees can no longer be complacent when it comes to their grasp of technology and how to use it to help their businesses grow. That’s something to keep in mind, for sure, whether you’re just embarking on a career or whether you’re already in the workforce and want to make sure you have the skills you need to stay marketable.

The Modern Worker Needs to Be Constantly Learning

“Like the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers that preceded them, Millennials have strong preferences and priorities on what they think the workplace should look like,” said Seth Robinson, senior director, technology analysis, CompTIA. “It will be interesting to see if these preferences become the norm as more millennials enter senior leadership positions; or if millennials change their views as they take on greater responsibilities to clients, communities, employees and shareholders.”

rkplace Flexibility

Social Media

the single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants. Many collaborative efforts ultimately fail to reach their full potential because they lack a strong relational foundation.

Trust not control

network entrepreneurs focus on creating authentic relationships and building deep trust from the bottom up. This focus on relationship-building costs relatively little yet ultimately makes a tremendous difference in impact. Network entrepreneurs ensure that the power of others grows while their own power fades, thereby developing capacity in the field and a culture of distributed leadership that dramatically increases the collaboration’s efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.

The related field of appreciative inquiry offers similar flip-the-question approaches but is more specific, asking us to look for and build on the positive case or “outlier.” Is there someone in the community already exhibiting the desired behavior? What is enabling them to outperform? What resources are they tapping into that others are not? Not “Why are staph infections so high in the hospital?” but “Why are staph infections lower on the third floor?” Not “Why are sales down in Regions 6 and 9?” but “Why are sales up in Region 4?” Not “Why do so few graduates of our leadership academy get promoted?” but “Why did these seven graduates get promoted?” Why is the accident rate lower in _______? Why is the turnover rate lower in ______? Why are there fewer ethics complaints about ______ division?