The decade of being collaborative

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Christian Drehkopf

A nice article from Valerie Casey published on Fastcompany helps us to think more deeply about the way we need to work together instead of trying to push ourselves as economical structures in front of our competitors. A decade of fighting against each other seems to vanish in order to create a world of collaboration. “We can´t do everything on our own” she mentions and this is even more true in a world of seemliness communication that happens around us and connects everybody with everyone.

Excerpt

There isn’t one firm which is good at everything, and despite our great sophistication in branding, we use a startlingly slim vocabulary to describe our services: design, innovation, strategy, consulting, and often incomprehensively esoteric terminology to describe our organizational make-up and processes. (I’ve known some firms to spend half a pitch describing their internal structure. Here’s a short cut: “we collaborate.”)

It’s certainly easy to observe that over the last ten years, many firms have grown to unwieldy sizes. Studios now have small armies of business development people working around the clock to bring in new work to support large operational budgets. And it’s recursive: the more work we do, the greater need for growth, the more we grow, the more work we need. The collateral damage of this cycle is lawyer-like bill rates of leadership. This means that teams of freshly minted undergrads get less time with senior talent and their projects are often unchaperoned–which can be a good thing, but not when dealing with experienced clients. We also tend to take on project work that may more closely match how we describe what we do, rather than what we actually can do. Again, this may push us, but likely not in the right direction when dealing with experienced clients.

Full article:
Goodbye I, Hello We: The Decade of Interdependence