Collaboration
For my sins I have an M.B.A. I am a child of the ’70’s. By the time I hit the ’90’s an M.B.A. was the qualification to have if you were intent on pursuing a corporate career.
The course taught me all about the parts of big business. I learnt about:
- Finance and accounting
- Sales and marketing
- Operations and the supply chain
- Human resources
- Risk and compliance
The list went on and on. My M.B.A. taught me everything. It set me up for life. At least that is what the glossy brochure said it would do.
The thought experiment
There is a famous thought experiment. If you could build the perfect car how would you do it? You could poll the world’s cleverest automotive engineers and ask them to choose the best parts on the market:
- An engine from a Ferrari
- The transmission of a Range Rover
- The safety features of a Volvo
- The brakes of a Lamborghini
- The suspension of a Rolls Royce
- The body of a Bugatti
If you took all these individual parts and put them together would you build the ultimate car?
Nope, you’d end up with a pile of junk that didn’t move.
The component parts are useless by themselves. It is how you stitch them together that matters.
The gaps in my M.B.A.
Like the thought experiment I learnt all about the best ways to run a function. I had best practices and case studies coming out of my ears. But I didn’t learn a thing about what holds those functions together.
I wasn’t taught about organisational pride or worker relations. I learnt nothing about the impact of the budgeting game or how to build trust and cooperation. Nobody once thought to warn me how toxic a weak boss or a bully can be.
I didn’t learn a thing about the intangibles that hold an organisation together, or pull it apart.
Collaboration wasn’t on the syllabus.
Build collaboration
To improve your organisation don’t worry about improving the individual functions. Plenty of people are already doing that. Focus on the bits that are holding it together.
You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and”. ~ Sufi story
If you enjoyed this post click here to receive the next
Watch another opinion
Image by tamahaji
Well said, James. Part of the problem with higher education is that what happens in books doesn’t happen in the real world. Not til we actually have to deal with the issues you mention do we actually learn what we should do (or shouldn’t have done). There’s a huge debate going on every day about that degree, that piece of paper… what’s more important, the paper or the hands-on, real world experience?
Just like a relay team. The race is often won at the change over.
Adrian, I think you hit the nail squarely on the head