Lonely, Scared & Bitter
Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and other insightful books, is also a prolific blogger who is well worth reading. He has posted the fascinating graphic above, attributed to Jessica Hagy - no accompanying text except the title 'Lonely, scared & Bitter' and the chart.
It's a great piece of communication suggesting that the path to happiness is to be generous, calm and sharing. A little simplistic maybe, but no more so than the analyst 'magic quadrant' aggregations and 'hype wave' predictions buyers browse to attempt to make sense of vertical markets.
Apply Seth's chart to organizations silos particularly - and all sorts of thoughts come up for me. When times are good departments go on land grabs, installing IT infrastructure to support their team, often driven by ambitious leadership. There's always an edge to these environments, and when the economic tide goes out, these fiefdom fortresses are usually left increasingly isolated. The cost sticks out like a sore thumb on budgets, and hard questions are asked about why a vertical need was catered for ignoring other colleagues.
What was a departmental powerhouse, sometimes competing internally with others, is left lonely and isolated.
From a philosophical perspective it is far better to 'think collaborate' from the earliest planning stages, not just with your colleagues but with your most intransigent blockers in an organization.
The hand of friendship - and associated IT connecting hooks - can look very attractive when the chips are down and a major reorganization is on the cards.
Admittedly using this tactically against competitive, awkward associates can be all about timing but it is far better to have a peace plan and potential connectivity in your back pocket than not....
When looking at effective collaboration solutions it is wise to plan for associations as far and wide as you can. I did a presentation for Fujitsu last November in London England, and an attendee shared that if you'd said to him that his company would be partnering with a company in Costa Rica a couple of years ago he would have thought you were crazy, it was so hard to imagine.
It's happened now of course, and the collaboration channels and connectivity are probably mission critical to success. This is the world today, and it's changing fast...