Collaborate to Compete : Driving Profitability in the Knowledge Economy

Knowledge has become the new source of wealth, and the co-creation and sharing of knowledge through collaboration, the key to the success of today's organization. Collaboration is everyone's business and every business's concern. Unfortunately, the mindset of most business people is not one of cooperation, but of competition.

Collaborate to Compete, offers a practical, applied approach to fostering a spirit of cooperation not just within an organization, but also with suppliers, customers, and even competitors to gain a competitive advantage.

Many knowledge management initiatives and approaches have failed in their attempt to harness and share the knowledge resident in organizations because they focus on technology, systems, and the valuation of intellectual property, but often neglect the human side. Collaborate to Compete goes beyond the traditional technological approaches of knowledge management systems to address the human challenges, as well as the psychological, cultural, and organizational barriers to employees, suppliers, and customers actually using these systems.

Collaborate to Compete:

• Shows how to create an atmosphere of trust, teamwork and collaboration and the promotion of emotional intelligence.
• Offers practical tools, processes and exercises that are helpful in developing a culture of collaboration.
• Introduces a unique assessment instrument, the Collaboration Quotient, that measures the readiness of individuals and of their organization to collaborate. It is also used to monitor the organization's progress in developing collaboration.
• Provides a detailed design for a practical and effective Internet-based knowledge network that facilitates knowledge sharing and co-creation.
• Includes comprehensive coverage on: how to transform a command-and-control organization into a collaborative one; how to measure, maintain, and increase collaboration; how to identify and eliminate the systems and processes that hinder collaboration; how to reward and encourage collaboration; and much more.
• Features examples and case studies that provide a blueprint for implementation, including organizations such as Documentum, Hill & Knowlton, Intel, Northrop Grumman, Open Text, Siemens, Turner Construction, Vignette and others.

Robert K. Logan, B.S. and Ph.D. from M.I.T., is a Physics professor at the University of Toronto, where he is cross appointed to the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education and active in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. He has conducted research in physics, environmental studies, linguistics, media studies, computer applications in education and knowledge management. He was a policy adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He has produced five other books in his career, two on politics, The Way Ahead for Canada and Canada’s Third Option, and three on communications cum linguistics, The Alphabet Effect, The Fifth Language, and The Sixth Language.

Louis W. Stokes, Ph.D., cofounder of Collaboration Associates Inc., is a leading authority on collaborative processes and assessment in organizations. As a psychologist and senior business consultant, he has extensive experience helping individuals, managers and executives build collaborative relationships and business partnerships that increase productivity. He has held executive HR positions in Fortune 500 companies in the United States and Canada and is on faculty at the Division of Executive Development, Schulich School of Business, York University. He obtained his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.