When businesses share strategic goals, when their aim is to reach the same destination, when they understand the challenges and the difficulties that they’ll face along the journey and can share the knowledge, experience, and skills that they have gathered in making the journey that they have made, then you will find opportunities not just to co-operate with each other but to collaborate. Collaboration means driving understanding to a level beyond that of a supplier / customer relationship or a peer-to-peer one. It means understanding the likely outcomes of actions, not just in your own business or in your own life, but in the business and lives of those with whom you choose to work.
When businesses collaborate:
- the finances and arrangement of payments between the businesses matters less than the outcome.
- the needs of one party never outweigh the needs of the other.
- customers of the combination can’t see the join and ultimately that means it’s likely the businesses will form a more closely linked formal arrangement through either a merger or shareholding swap.
Are you ready to collaborate with some of the business you currently are just cooperating with?
