Teresa Hawkes, a lovely woman I am privileged to know, is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience and recently responded to the question of how she looks at the brain and the body with this,
“Well, after all this training I see them as groups of specialized cells that cooperate to sustain and create the experience of our lives. Further, cells are cities built by intelligent molecules, so at all levels of our being we are the result of cooperating entities.”
Which brings me to a though that has been visiting me frequently of late.
If we are made through collaboration, then does it not follow that collaboration be our natural state?
Silos can be the opposite of collaboration, and I propose to you, that the silos we have created for left and the right only serve to slow or even prevent progress. No, before I lose you, I’m not referring to politics. I’m going back to that neuroscientist and thinking about our brains and how we’ve compartmentalized worlds and created silos that hinder interdisciplinary collaboration.
Who says psychology doesn’t play a role in marketing? Who ever said ethics and business were not inherently intertwined? Who says the creative and the analytical can’t play nice? When did we decide that the left brain was intended for business and the right for less ‘practical’ things like the arts? What other worlds have we segregated and at what cost? Who says dance has no place in issues of public health?
Here’s a great example from India:
The World Health Organization agrees that filtering water by folding a cloth 8 times can be just as effective at reducing bacteria in water and saving lives as expensive, cumbersome imported equipment difficult to distribute to places at high risk of water bourne disease. Without a clear return on investment for any corporate entity, it was not government, ad agencies nor global health practitioners who succeeded at spreading this simple message to millions of rural citizens in India, but artists, singers, dancers, driving a campaign bringing educational songs and dances to places that needed this information most. Check out Mallika Sarabhai’s Ted Talk to hear this story from the horse’s mouth.
And another example from one of the top US business schools with a long legacy of focusing on global business:
In the aftermath of the Enron debacle in the early 2000′s, Ángel Cabrera -the president of Thunderbird’s School of Global Management- led an effort to develop a kind of Hippocratic oath for business professionals, which only now, in response to the global financial crisis, is really starting to gain widespread attention. In fact, it was recently adopted (called the “MBA Oath”) by the Harvard Business School and others around the globe. I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Cabrera earlier this month and was struck by his view of the changing world of business and especially, of his message of collaboration and integration of business and social change, especially in relation to the growing role of emerging markets.
Collaboration is at the heart of any cross-disciplinary effort, and as I think about Cabrera and Sarabhai while I sit in conferences and talks about the future of social media, crowdsourcing, cloud development and other collaboration-driven phenomena, I can’t help but wonder if this trendy arena of collaboration is leaning increasingly farther away from “trend” and instead falling more heavily on the side of “global social imperative”.
What say you about this now-ubiquitous idea of collaboration? Trend or new social order? Or something in between?
