Why Collaborate?

“Collaborate?” an executive once asked us. “Sure, I’ll collaborate. If I’m cornered and don’t have a  choice.”

That’s old school talking: collaboration as a last resort.  A zero-sum world, my loss is your gain. “Eat lunch or be lunch,” as ex-Sun CEO Scott McNealy once declared.

Go it alone today? Think again.

These days no one can go it alone. In the networked world, no one need to.

The "collabonomics" have all changed - for security, for safety, for health and prosperity. It all adds up differently now. Collaboration is easier than ever; a lot of the "friction" that was gluing up collaboration yesterday, is gone today. Performance? Practically impossible to deliver without it. Ask a soldier. A physician. A CEO. A president or prime minister.

Everyone is connected. Today, 800 million of your "friends" are on Facebook. None were there a few years ago. In 2011 twenty million joined Goggle+'s new platform in a matter of days. In five years data will grow by 800 percent - 80 percent of it unstructured from social media. Today, six billion mobile devices connect to the Internet. By 2020, make that ten billion - twenty-four billion if you include sensors activators and monitors - the so called "Internet of Things."

Think we're finished? Think again. We've just begun.

Being connected is important - but it's no silver bullet. Technology can tip change, and speed it up. Technology alters the collabonomics of coming together, joining forces. But if it were only about the technology, the one with the best toys would always win.

Where everyone is connected, the game-changer is collaboration. Collaboration unleashes the power of the many to do together what none can do alone. In the networked world collaboration is the first move you make. It makes the pie bigger for all; everyone does better together than alone.

And collaboration is about people. With everyone connected and change moving fast, success depends more than ever on having the right people saying, "Yes!" and doing "yes," fast. Managed right collaboration gives you unstoppable advantage.

Everyone's going for that - taking advantage of the new collabonomics of the networked world to out-innovate, out-race, out-pace, and out-collaborate adversaries, competitors, and even nature.

Welcome to "Collaborate or Perish!"- a playbook for the networked world.