Quotes About Collaboration

When he ran a review of his team's Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

the whiteboard effect. For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

The Innovators, Isaacson later

In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.

When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don't lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us.

It's worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It's helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict.

The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the advent of the record store allowed the small-town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world's best bands.

The professors at MIT—some of the most innovative technologists in the world—wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.

According to Johnson, access to new ideas and to the "liquid networks" that facilitate their mixing and matching often provides the catalyst for breakthrough new ideas.

The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight—be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually—can short-circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth.

The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?

The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The

Work is not just about getting things done; it's a collection of messy human personalities trying to figure out how to successfully collaborate.

No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.

I love women. I'm trying to do beautiful things with them. I'm not trying to insult them. My life is not about that.

To work entirely independent of others is art. To work creatively as a team, with a share of the work done privately, is design.

Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones.

George Cukor was still a young emerging talent at RKO, but they were to become lifelong friends after making Dinner at Eight and Camille together. Cukor called Frances a "Holy Wonder—so ravishingly beautiful and so talented.

Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of the story by himself. If one had gone chasing after a lead at night or on a weekend, the other felt compelled to do the same. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

The August 1 story had carried their joint byline; the day afterward, Woodward asked Sussman if Bernstein's name could appear with his on the follow-up story - though Bernstein was still in Miami and had not worked on it. From the on, any Watergate story would carry both names. Their colleagues melded the two into one and gleefully named their byline Woodstein. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

River mostly contributed backing vocals and handclaps, although he may have played some guitar on "Rock Out with Your Cock Out.

Concert doesn't mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony.

C'mon, Alec," Damien said. "Sung just wants us to win." "No," I said. "Sung only wants us to win. There's a difference." Damien and the others looked at me blankly. This was not, I remembered, a word-choice crowd.

In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had already been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their