Kare Anderson’s Quote of the Day:

The following are more than just pithy one-liners — these are some deep insights that take a bit more time to read and digest. 

Optimize Your Interestingness

It is the instigator, the hardy carrier pigeon that can carry your message most anywhere. Your interestingness makes a message get heard above the noise. Money can’t buy interestingness, yet vivid comparisons can create them. To make your self-label stick it must be more interesting than others’ labels for you. Whoever most vividly characterizes a situation usually determines how others see it, talk about it, and make decisions about it. The good news and the bad is that reputations can be ruined or lifted by vivid labeling. More than money, title or even good looks, your capacity to craft the most vivid characterization will make it bob, like a cork, to the top of the water of alternative messages.

Increase Your Positive Impact

In our increasingly tech-enabled, connected world, bad and good can happen faster, be initiated from more places and travel farther. Consequently, The Law of Unintended Consequences is increasingly becoming the norm, not the exception. Coupling that with the finding that negative effects are more widely imitated than positive, your most noble calling may be to initiate and support tools, events and others’ actions that serve the greater good.

See Worry As Self-Harassment And Fear As A Friend

“Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was usually linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death, said the author of The Gift of Fear, Gavin DeBecker who once said “When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.” Honing this ability to recognize fear may not always protect us from some kinds of acts of random violence yet can help. Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture. The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life. Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life. When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”

Jumpstart the Team’s Motivation to Optimize Performance

Explain to your team why you have chosen each member, and what their individual talent and experience brings to the task.  Citing, up front, each team member’s relevant individual talent will encourage their positivity even when their part of the task may be difficult.

Adopt the Counterintuitive Way To Be Liked

One of the biggest misconceptions about connecting is seeking, first, to be liked. In fact, the counterintuitive way to get someone to like you is in knowing this core truth: If they like the way they feel when around you, they will like you. In fact, they will project onto you the character traits they most like in others, even if you have not yet exhibited them. Conversely, if they do not like the way they act when around you, they will instinctively blame you for it, regardless of the true reason. They will project onto you some of the qualities they most dislike in others, whether or not you have actually exhibited them. What’s worse, they will go out of their way to prove they are right, even in ways that damage their reputation as well as yours.

Pull in Customers Via Smart Partnering

One of the most efficient and satisfying way to grow any business or other organization is via profitable partnering with complementary organizations that serve the same kind of “clients” – via the right partnering methods. Hint: Mutuality Matters

When to Lighten Up 
When others begin to act “hot,” we instinctively tend to either escalate (become like them and get loud, more hostile, or other mimicking reactions), or withdraw (poker face, quiet down and/or leave). Either approach gets us out of balance. Both are self-protective but self-sabotaging reactions. They are akin to saying “I don’t like you behavior thus spurring it to intensify. Instead, warm up your voice and slow everything down: your voice level and rate and the amount and frequency of your body motions.

Fast Thinkers Aren’t Smarter Than Slow

Collaborating in real time and over time via email or other written informational exchanges leverages our collective value and limits pitfalls of both kinds of thinkers. Discuss options both face-to-face and virtually to enable fast and slow thinkers to optimize value for the team.

Unexpected Allies

To gain greater credibility  clout and visibility: involve unexpected allies, ardently united around something specific that you all believe is meaningful.

One Way to Make Your Label Stick

Use a familiar slogan in a fresh way: After a company has spent millions to make a slogan familiar, skew it in a new direction for your intended meaning. Piggybacking on the famous “Got milk?” slogan, the Redwood Hospital in Northern California launched a billboard campaign to seek blood donations with this appeal: “Got blood?” My friend, Paul Geffner, once owned a chicken take-out joint in San Francisco called Poultry in Motion.

Flourish Holding The Gem of Sharing Good News

Sharing good news generates four nourishing benefits.  You boost happiness and inclination towards acting in good will in yourself and in those who see the story, plus you shine in the reflected glow of the story you share. Plus we are more inclined to share positively inspiring news that matches our values.

Way to Bond Diverse Groups

To boost bonding among others so they are more apt to work (or play) well together, ask them, when together, to do two powerfully simple things that can be done rather quickly:
1. Write down the ways they are like each other. Hint: Create a level playing field. Writing rather than immediately sharing helps slow thinkers keep up with fast thinkers. Fast thinkers aren’t smarter, just different in their thinking processes, and each kind has advantages and pitfalls, so they can accomplish more together than when a majority in a group think and speak at the same speed. Hint: Salespeople are often fast thinkers.
2. Share with each other what they wrote, going around the circle, one by one.
Bonus benefit: Other studies show that when you reflect on how you are similar to those with whom you are talking, you pay more attention to them. You care about them more. That spurs the other person to listen more closely to you.

Get to Their Heart of the Matter

To get a glimpse of what most concerns the person you are around, be warm yet brief. That’s most likely to evoke a question from them. Answer it genially and briefly. That way you are most likely to evoke a follow-up question that you also answer cordially yet in few words. Then listen closely for the third question. With each question that person has inadvertently gotten more candid about what most interests them  – about you and them – on that topic.  The third question will be most revealing about what’s top-of-mind for them in that moment.

Why Redefine Your Work and Life Around a Mutuality Mindset

More than money, talent, or your number of contacts, your capacity to create mutuality with others can transform you into a sought-after Opportunity Maker with whom people most want to align. Be the glue that sticks the right teams together to solve problems or seize opportunities sooner and better together. 

Brevity is best

President Calvin Coolidge, nicknamed “Silent Cal,” was once challenged by a reporter, saying, “I bet someone that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge responded, “You lose.” The notion of crafting six word memoirs really took off after Smith Magazine shared this poignant one written by Ernest Hemingway: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Pithiness pays off for other reasons: When required to be brief, for example, we gain clarity about what we really mean — or have to offer. As Mark Twain once wrote, in a slower-paced time, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

 Motion Boosts Emotion

We tend to like each other better when walking, sitting or standing side by side or at right angles from each other. Also, we get along better when we meet around an oval or round table, more than a square or rectangular table.

Greater Credibility

To gain greater credibility  clout and visibility: involve unexpected allies, ardently united around something specific that you all believe is meaningful.

Why Mutuality Matters

Quiet your chattering mind promotes directed action. We can’t know which interactions will deepen into richer relationships, yet we can keep the faith that our us-centric mutuality mindset and actions can attract those we meet. Mutuality most demonstrates our humanity and, in the end, that may be what most matters in our lives.

One Way to Create a Clear Explanation

Ask an expert & novice to craft it: Experts knows too much (curse of knowledge) and novices see it with fresh eyes. In so doing, you may be able to create understandable verbal snapshots that penetrate the mind and the gut in an instant then linger, leaving a bright after image. 

…and finally:

When you don’t like your slice of the pie co-create a bigger pie

“If you would not be forgotten 
as soon as you are dead and rotten, 
either write things worthy of reading, 
or do things worth the writing.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

“Whoever most vividly characterizes a situation usually determines how others see it, feel abut it and act on it.”
~ Kare Anderson

“Realize that dialogue has occurred when speaking leads to a new state of mutual understanding, and right action arises. This is also the purpose of designing.”
~ Peter Jones

“Everyone hears only what he understands.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.”
~ Douglas Coupland

“Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.”
~ Margaret Wheatley

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
~ Oprah Winfrey

“Consequential strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest – our family and close friends – often put us into. Through interacting with people who do not know us as well, we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, ‘But that’s not like you!’”
~ Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman

A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.”
~ David Bollier

“Bid for connection: Each of our daily interactions with another person.”
~ John Gottman

“Some of the power has shifted from companies to people. Using social media tools (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) more individuals are creating semi-spontaneous ‘groundswells’ of opinions to which companies and other institutions are realizing they must respond.  From marketing to consumers organizations are being pulled into engaging with individuals.”
~ Charlene Li

“We need to play each others instruments.”
~ Steven Johnson

“In everybody’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner fire.”
~ Albert Schweitzer

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?”
~ Mevlana Rum

“There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’”
~ Howard Thurman

“Never make someone a priority… when they only make you an option.”
~ Unknown

“To be successful you can’t show up to the potluck with just a fork.”
~ Dave Liniger

“Chance favors the connected mind.”
~ Steven Johnson

“Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table”
~ Clay Shirky

“Because knowledge changes so rapidly, knowledge flow is more important than knowledge stock.”
~ John Hagel

“The key to delivering both operational excellence and innovation is having networks of informal collaboration.”
~ Rob Cross, Peter Gray, Shirley Cunningham, Mark Showers and Robert J. Thomas

“Maybe we are not here to see each other but to see each other through.”
~ anonymous

“We live in two worlds – order and chaos.  In the world of order, we plan, reflect, and think about what to do next.  In the world of chaos, things happen, we get things done, yet unpredictability persists.   In one world, we like to think we are in control.  In the other, we mingle together with increasing complexity, conflict, and uncertainty.”
~ David Spangler

“A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.”
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect, the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.”
~ E.M. Forrester

“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.”
~ Max Lucade

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung

“Be more interested than interesting.”
~ Mark Goulston

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”
~ Miles Davis

“No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.”
~ Marcus Buckingham

“Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us). It is our innate nature as “herd” animals that cause mass movements, not the influence of a handful of influential individuals.”
~ Mark Earls

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
~ Plato

“Some of us cry when we watch sad movies or wince when we see athletes fall. This sense of shared experience is at the core of human experience. Because our brain has mirror neurons, we are capable of interpreting facial expressions of pain or joy, the first step towards feeling empathy, which causes an instinctively imitative response – the chameleon effect. That ‘mirroring’ response enables two people to literally see they are more alike in that moment.  That similarity evokes familiarity and thus a feeling of comfort that can lead to mutual trust with others.  When these mirror neurons do not work an individual may not be aware of another’s feelings and thus act in socially incorrect ways.”
~ Marco Lacoboni

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
~ Henry Winkler

“The world you inhabit is the world you make. Your reputation precedes you, biasing the way new colleagues deal with you. Your first moves, friendly or hostile, tip the balance for future interactions. When you exhibit trust, you will most often find trustworthiness. When you are selfish, you will most often find selfishness. When you compete, others must resort to competition. If you choose to play the game strictly for your own advantage, your attempts at collaboration will indeed be (as Thomas Hobbes said), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’”
~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.”
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
~ John F Kennedy

“All for one, one for all.”
~ Alexander Dumas

“Thanks to the convergence of crowdsourcing, social media and social networks, the world is becoming a more responsive place. While we’re still experiencing the adolescence of social media, the information systems we’re building are starting to get better at taking input from crowds of people and using it to help us mine the data glut for what we, as indviduals, are most likely to want or to need.”
~ Marcia Stepanek

“If your friend’s friend’s friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too.”

~ James H. Fowler

“The only people who can own social learning are the individuals who themselves are learning each day, from one another, based on their work and in the flow of work.”
~ Marcia Conner

“Emergent practices can be developed collaboratively while solving problems for which there are no definitive answers.”
~ Harold Jarche

“This is meritocracy at its best—a highly diverse set of people, in every sense of the word, crowd-sourcing and crowd-storming.”
~ John Donovan

“The power to share has already turned once-solitary activities into social occasions.”
~ Melinda Blau

“When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought.”
~ Theodore Zeldin

“Let’s just keep asking ourselves this question: ‘Is what I’m about to do strengthening the web of connections, or is it weakening it?’”
~ Margaret Wheatley

“Emerging at the other end, we will not be the same as we were; we will have become more humble, more connected to the natural world, fitter, leaner, more skilled and, ultimately, wiser.”
~ Rob Hopkins

“Through the creation of personal media Internet users form ‘just-in-time-just-like-me support groups’ that expand and further their personal networks.”
~ Lee Rainie

“In our private lives in the last decade, we’ve gone through enormous change that has affected everything, from the way we do business to how we view intelligence and attention. We have to rethink it all in a more interactive, networked, and collaborative way.”
~ Cathy Davidson

“In mathematics, a lattice allows for movement in all directions and each point can connect to all others, much like a high speed network. In organizations, the corporate lattice describes careers that can develop in multiple directions; work that has an array of options for how it is performed; and participation in solving problems and generating ideas that moves from top down to all in. We call these the ‘lattice ways.’”
~ Cathleeen Benko and Molly Anderson

“Can collective intelligence save the planet? It’s the only hope we have.”
~ Patrick J. McGovern

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
~ Anais Nin

“Sharing is one of those solutions where you get multiple benefits.  It brings people together and helps them save resources and money. It’s also an ideal solution for uncertain times. When you’re in league with others, you can prepare yourself and your community for any type of outcome.”
~ Neal Gorenflo

“You might sit at your computer, thinking you own and control your own ideas but it doesn’t take long before you realize that you’re part of a bigger network. You’re fully wrapped up in relationships out of which you come and in which you participate. To look at yourself as a single being is absurd. The new way to look at it is, ‘I’m connected, therefore I am.'”
~ Kenneth Gergen

“Why not allow patrons to comment on directors’ decisions, vote on costume design, listen to dancers’ conversations, volunteer to help out in ways beyond just writing a check? They can see themselves as co-producers, not just bystanders.”
~ Chris Elam

“Companies usually have a mix of two communities, defenders of the faith and seekers of the truth. You certainly do not look for innovation from defenders.”
~ Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran

“The most successful social media experiments—whether spearheaded by one person, a group of individuals, a company, or an institution—invite you in, treat you as a friend, and make you feel at home. Look around, they say, and tell us how we can make things better; get to know us. Get involved and tell us what you think.”
~ Melinda Blau

“If a person or organization isn’t genuinely committed to establishing relationships, sharing openly, and really listening to its constituents, then social media is just window dressing. In order to use the tools effectively, you have to change the way you work. There’s a loss of control—transparency means having more porous boundaries. The norm now is to be open.”
~ Beth Kanter

“If we don’t support the people who support us, what are we going to do?”
~ Chris Brogan

“Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.”
~ Steven Johnson

“We can mimic the ties that used to happen face-to-face, but on a scale and in ways that have never happened before. Social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back to bartering, trading, swapping, gifting, loaning, and sharing, but they’re being reinvented. Whereas credit ratings gave people access in the ‘old consumer system’ peer evaluations enable us to become collaborative consumers.”
~ Rachel Botsman

“For organizations to stay on top of information, and more importantly – to successfully innovate in this environment- they need to have scalable network relationships.”
~ Francine Gordon

“We must take responsibility for educating ourselves. Being part of a ‘smart mob’ doesn’t guarantee that you’re a responsible participant or collaborator.”
~ Howard Rheingold

“The essence of sustainability is long-term relationships. A long-term view makes it easier to deal with the ebb and flow common to relationships, knowing we’ll each be here tomorrow, for each other! Knowing we are in a long-term relationship gives us a measure of security.  It frees us to practice business in sustainable ways; no need to grab and run!  Fair Trade partnerships build on this idea. Building long-term relationships requires up-front due diligence, asking difficult questions; e.g., Do we share the same values? Is there business market demand for our product?”
~ Ben Ziegler

“Surround yourself with a loving community.”
~ Susan Harrison

“Some say human nature will never change—that the net will bring more divisiveness and attack politics. Others say, ‘No, we’ll know more about each other; be more forgiving.’ The reality is that both are true. For some people, it will encourage better angels.”
~ Lee Rainie

“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
~ Eric Hoffer

“By the late ’90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.”
~ Andy Gove

“Dissent makes the group as a whole smarter and leads to more divergent thinking, but the people who stand up with those sorts of opinions often get beaten up for it.”
~ Charlan Nemeth

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you 
want to go far, go
 with others.”
~ African proverb

“Collaboration is the new competition.”
~ Pamela Slim and Michele Woodward

“Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.”
~ Mike Rutherford

“It’s not that the (social media) tools themselves inspire trust and collaboration. We use them as a medium to connect, and thus generate trust and enthusiasm.”
~ Nancy White

“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’ They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”
~ Peter Drucker

Quote from the boss: “Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.”
~ Dilbert

“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.”
~ Alexander Graham Bell

“An assigned team can do good things; a self-organized team can accomplish great things.”
~ Kare Anderson

“Human communities depend upon diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.”
~ Ken Robinson

“We tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never get solved yet sometimes we are able to solve a deep problem because what I don’t know what the person to my left or right does.”
~ Peter Senge

“There is nothing antithetical in American history, culture, or traditions to teamwork. Teams were important in America’s history – wagon trains conquered the West, men working together on the assembly line in American industry conquered the world, a successful national strategy and a lot of teamwork put an American on the moon first (and thus fare, last). But American mythology extols only the individual…In America, halls of fame exist for almost every conceivable activity, but nowhere do Americans raise monuments in praise of teamwork.”
~ Lester Thurow

“Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully – and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.”
~ Patrick Lencioni

“Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration. Working across organizational values can create tremendous value or destroy it – the hoarding and squabbling endemic in large companies can actually make collaboration more expensive than not attempting it.”
~ Morten T. Hansen

“What we need to do is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis.”
~ W. Edward Deming

“Economic activity is no longer an adversarial contest between embattled sellers and buyers “In the distributed economy, where collaboration trumps competition, inclusivity replaces exclusivity and transparency and openness to others becomes essential to the new way of conducting business, empathic sensibility has room to breathe and thrive. It is no longer so constrained by hierarchies, boundaries of exclusion, and a concept of human nature that places acquisitiveness, self-interest, and utility at the center of the human experience.”
~ Jeremy Rifkin

“Wild ducks make a lot of noise, but they also have the sense to benefit from occasionally flying in formation.”
~ Unknown

“We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful.  If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies.  When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don’t waste energy trying to see the funny side of it.  Do it in the ‘closed’ mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the ‘open’ mode—to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is need to improve on what we have done.  We must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.”
~ John Cleese

“Effective collaboration is about maximizing time, talent and tools to create value. The old way was the pass-along approach. I do my job and then pass along my work product to you. You do your piece of it and pass it along to somebody else.”
~ Evan Rosen

“A boat doesn’t go forward if each one is rowing their own way.”
~ Swahili proverb

“There are three stages of organizational development in this networked era. 1. Fortress – an organization where there are insiders and outsiders, and the two rarely meet or interact; 2. Transactional – an organization that is engaged with their community, but with the sole focus of transactions, such as getting people to sign up for an event or make a donation; and 3. Transparent – an organization that fully engages and empowers their community to accomplished shared goals.”
~ Beth Kanter and Allison Fine

“The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.”
~ Thomas Stallkamp

“Hackman’s paradox: Groups have natural advantages: they have more resources than individuals; greater diversity of resources; more flexibility in deploying the resources; many opportunities for collective learning; and, the potential for synergy. Yet studies show that their actual performance often is subpar relative to “nominal” groups (i.e. individuals given the same task but their results are pooled.) The two most common reasons: groups are assigned work that is better done by individuals or are structured in ways that cap their full potential.”
~ Richard Hackman

“Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.”
~ Matt Ridley

“Up to 70% of employees’ work is now done collaboratively.”
~ American School & University

“In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person’s contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that’s more responsive to the changing environment. “ ~ Keith Sawyer

“Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks… when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.”
~ David Brooks

“Trafficking organizations these days take the form of decentralized networks that shift continuously, assuming new configurations as opportunities present themselves and then morphing again to meet the needs of the next moment. They don’t specialize in a single commodity like cocaine. Instead, they move whatever goods present an opportunity for profit in the present moment; drugs today, arms tomorrow, people the next day and then knock-off designer handbags after that. Yet government agencies’ understanding of the organizational structure of international trafficking networks is dangerously out of date. They go after the illicit trades as if they had a hierarchical structure with information and power flowing up and down a chain of command.”
~ Moises Naim

“Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.”
~ Casey Stengel

“There is a central difference between the old and new economies: the old industrial economy was driven by economies of scale; the new information economy is driven by the economics of networks…”
~ Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian

“In an increasingly connected world it is less likely that a few people ‘manage’ everyone else. The new environment requires a shift in the organization of both institutions and societies, one of flexible teams of teams that come together around whatever change opportunities exist and then reform around the next.”
~ Bill Drayton, Ashoka

“Hot groups have members who are task-obsessed and full of passion. They share a style which is “intense, sharply focused, and full bore. Members feel engaged in an important, even vital and personally ennobling mission; their task dominates all other considerations; and although such intense teams tend to remain intact only for a relatively short period of time, that time is remembered nostalgically and in considerable detail by its members.”
~ J. Lipman-Blumen and J. and H. Leavitt

“For productive collaboration adopt five principles: involve the relevant stakeholders, build consensus phase by phase, design a process map, designate a process facilitator and harness the power of group memory.”
~ David Straus and Thomas C. Layton

“With wolves, solidarity is first but when they hunt, they change roles. The implicit hierarchy depends on who does what. In an organization one unique person makes a difference, but you need teamwork to make it happen.”
~ C. K. Prahalad

“In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person’s contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that’s more responsive to the changing environment.“
~ Keith Sawyer

“Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn’t conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn’t decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.”
~ Steven Johnson

“Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other’s prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.”
~ Cass Sunstein

“Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.”
~ Mike Rutherford

“Some of the power has shifted from companies to people. Using social media tools (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) more individuals are creating semi-spontaneous ‘groundswells’ of opinions to which companies and other institutions are realizing they must respond.  From marketing to consumers organizations are being pulled into engaging with individuals.”
~  Charlene Li

“Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.”
~ Scott E. Page

“Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully – and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.”
~ Patrick Lencioni

“Collaboration happens when the right players share a strong sweet spot of mutual interest, and agree on an apt collaboration method and rules of engagement.”
~ Kare Anderson

“From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media  — where old and new media converge by involving fans  — is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator – or the brands that back them.”
~ Henry Jenkins

“In the long history of humankind…those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
~ Charles Darwin

“Effective collaboration is about maximizing time, talent and tools to create value. The old way was the pass-along approach. I do my job and then pass along my work product to you. You do your piece of it and pass it along to somebody else.”
~ Evan Rosen

“We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.”
~ Clay Shirky

“Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”. If we cannot say “no” then our “yes” has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations, without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving. No is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.”
~ Peter Block

“Groups need both carrot and stick-based rules to remain stable.”
~ Robert Axelrod

“Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel “you are welcome here and that you came to the right place.”
~ Peter Block

“Safety is a basic human need.  People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals will generate great ideas.”
~ John Sweeney

“If you want to have great partnerships, be a great partner. Get beyond yourself. Give up the notion that you are well-rounded, and stop expecting your colleagues to be universally proficient. Incorporate someone else’s motivations into your view of the accomplishment. Loosen up. Put aside your competitive nature, your prepackaged view of how the thing should be done, and your desire not to be inconvenienced with the imperfections of a fellow human being. Focus more on what you do for the partnership than what you get from it. Demonstrate trust and see if they don’t surprise you with their trustworthiness. Be slower to anger and quicker to forgive. And along the way, communicate continuously.”
~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.”
~ David Bollier

“We exist as a community, yet we achieve as a team.”
~ Boris Pluskowski

“Harmony in a team may well be the result rather than the cause of success.”
~ Mark de Rond

“Collaborative cultures accelerate the evolution of ideas, because they nurture cross pollination. Competitive cultures slow down the rate of evolution by locking their ideas away.”
~ David Hodgson

“A snowflake is one of God’s most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together.”
~ anonymous

“Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.”
~ William Butler Yeats

“Drink your tea slowly, reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves, slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.  Only this actual moment is life.”
~ Thich Nhah Hanh