Collaborate to Focus Better

Pranab Bardhan, a professor of Economics, wrote in Boston daily that "activists who romanticize the poor should keep in mind that the horrors of capitalism fade in comparison with the horrors of pre-capitalism". Many times we get lost in our own 'isms', thinking our 'ism well' is the world. With many 'isms' in the world, and each having its rightful place, we are running out of time in getting the pieces together into a master design. A master design where the red 'ism' and the 'green' ism all have a beautiful role to play and make awesome patterns.

The business world has been consolidating quite well in the last many years.This for sure has eliminated a lot of redundancy. Competition between players is definitely what makes different silos create competitive designs. However, in the business world, the paradigm of competition has moved up to extremely high levels of maturity.

If you take technology companies, years ago companies competed in bringing a new technology first to the market. Then when that became level playing, they moved to certain technological advantages within a certain standard. When that layer also became a level playing field, they moved up the value chain of competition to compete on pricing. Then came revolutionary companies who insulted the pricing game by ridiculously low prices which the giants got worried about. Over time, even that layer got leveled. The competition then evolved to service differentiations, which too did not take much time to level. Now the game is all about competing companies collaborating with each other to offer value-added solutions. The game is about cloud offerings where you no longer can live alone. Competition and Collaboration going beautifully hand in hand.

As a response to Pranab Bardhan's article, I wrote that a single brush stroke that paints all NGOs is too large to be real. What is needed is a constructive next step by leading NGO organizations and NGO consortiums in driving the thinking of Collaboration, where all who are focused on the people, be it NGO, be it corporations, be it governments, be it political parties look at optimizations in their own ecosystems, eliminating redundancies and boosting the strengths. The ecosystem, whether local or global, is large enough for everyone to pursue their passion, while still hand-holding and learning from one another.

If the business world is imaginative in this, we better learn from that imagination and apply it to the world that focuses on people - the social world. It is time we moved up the levels of maturity to a level relevant for the people. The business world moved up the layers to focus on the primary motive of their existence, which is profit. The social world likewise have to keep its focus on the primary motive of their passion and existence, which is people. The steps needed to achieve this are obvious, and there are many examples from the business world we can apply. We are also at a time in history, where technology itself is all oriented towards collaboration.

Let's collaborate and work systematically to focus better on the people.