Quotes About Collaboration

Usually a captain will allow his bowler to set the field, while exercising overall control and maintaining the authority to step in if he sees fit.

But overall I've always learned to play well in the sandbox with the people I'm working with. I think that's my minor-league training.

I point out things on the floor that I see, so we can be successful as a team overall.

Deals really have to do with the overlap of what one side wants and the other side wants, and it's really just the discovery of where that overlap is and how you decide to get there.

I tell my engineers that they should not overload me with information.

In a lot of aspects it's cooler that we don't have a lot of really overly famous people in the band.

There's a way to do networking that isn't overly brown-nosing.

One way a collaboration can go wrong is if your connection is inauthentic or overly prescriptive.

You need to have discussions and make sure you guide players towards the collective spirit. It can't be done overnight.

Sometimes all it takes to connect entrepreneurs to overseas buyers is to get them into the same room.

I think that together the church has learned a lot, and as we know from our own oversight board, the involvement of our wonderful lay leaders has been a real grace.

A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change.

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative. The necessary collaboration is not limited to the insides of lowest-level teams; there has to be collaboration as well between teams and between and among the organizations the teams belong to.

Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can't be changing. If you need to use a reactive strategy of contract labor, your team will probably never jell. In fact, the workforce you manage almost certainly won't be a team at all.

IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will go far.)

The project workers are the ones most familiar with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn't make sense to them, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Significant organizational learning can't happen in isolation. It always involves the joint participation of a set of middle managers. This requires that they actually talk to each other and listen to each other, rather than just taking turns talking to and listening to a common boss.

It's not uncommon to see real teams as a phenomenon of only the bottom level of the hierarchy.

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.

The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.

People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.