Collaboration As Business Extender

Last night I bought WIKINOMICS by Tapscott, based on Whitney Hoffman’s recommendation (Whitney runs the New Media Book Club, but you can’t be a member). I haven’t read a single page of it, because I’m working on other stuff, but maybe osmosis has given me the following thoughts:

Work goes better with a team- As Jeff Pulver and I are always forced to admit, without a team to execute, it’s not all that helpful to be an idea guy. (Thank *.deity for pulvermedia and their conference people. The trick here: recognize your weaknesses, and find teammates to help augment.

Working together extends your capabilities- The other day, [didn't say I could blog this] called me and said he wanted to co-write some books. “SOME BOOKS” not just “A” book. Mind you, I’m contemplating a book I want to write (with help from Jon Swanson), and/or I was thinking of offering to help Jeff get his book written. So, a modest estimate would say that’s five books. Could I write five books? No! But a team could.

Build Idea Handles- if you’re a LONG time reader of mine, you’ll know this is an oldie. I love the notion of giving people ideas they can run with themselves. Oh yeah, like PodCamp. You think Christopher Penn and I wanted to run them all? Hell no. You take it and run with it. We’ll just show up and have Timbits. : )

Collaboration builds crazy mutants- I love when an idea goes from a bicycle to an airplane after several heads get into the mix. Best of all is seeing the airplane fly, but it’s cool sometimes just to see the bike morph. (Does this make sense?)

You play too- I think Flickr is better than MySpace because it gets you into the game. Add snaps. Tag. Join groups. Comment. Make favorites. It’s a collection of verbs. Some of the best collaboration work allows others to leap right in and do something. (Worry: relying solely on the crowd can go wrong or scary. Sometimes the rule of 80, 19, 1 connects- 80 percent are audience-only. 10 percent are occasional contributors. 1 percent participate fully.)

We’re all in this together- One of the powers of PodCamp is that EVERYONE is in control of the day. If there aren’t any interesting sessions, make your own. If you see a mess, clean it up. If you’re in the mood for fruit and water instead of coffee and donuts, go across the street and bring back enough to share with the crowd. Getting people into OWNERSHIP positions is important. We’re trying hard to do that with Network2 and are open to more ideas on that.

Community comes into this- Getting people to collaborate works even better when you’ve already built a community. I have you guys. I ask you for help all the time. It’s not like I can just go ask strangers for help with how you’d describe me, or what the New Media School logo should look like, or whatever. I turn to my community.

What’d I miss? (Ever notice I end like this a lot? There’s a reason. I’m not the end-all. I’m the start of something you have much more experience dealing with.)