How can you use collaborations with other executives and entrepreneurs to make faster profit progress?
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.
Babe Ruth
Recovering alcoholics have support groups. So do those who abuse drugs. Could being in good company that's devoted to helping one another improve be an effective way to launch breakthrough thinking and results?
That question interested me in 1989 when I cofounded Share Price Growth 100 with Carol Coles. We invited our many stock-price improvements clients to join and many did. Other companies, which hadn't been clients, were intrigued as well and joined us. Everyone shared a common desire to learn more about stock-price improvement and hoped to accomplish that result by pooling perspectives to advance mutual knowledge through cooperative efforts.
Over the next decade, the group achieved astonishing results in revealing what worked, what didn't work, and how the lessons could be customized to an individual company. To those who were involved, the search for stock-price improvement methods felt as exciting as the project to decode the human genome: Their efforts created an accurate picture of how supply and demand for shares are influenced by what companies do.
That picture could be enlarged to describe the individual value genome for any member company: Swift, sustained stock-price growth quickly ensued for those who employed the lessons.
Impressed with these results, we extended the cooperative learning experiment to groups of chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and those who headed up individual business units in larger organizations. Motivated by sincere interest in performing better, these groups made breakthrough headway in many of the most intractable problems of the time: reducing the cost of company capital below zero; identifying how leaders could spur much more effective innovation at all organizational levels; making productivity improvements measured in thousands of percentage points; and managing the ascent from zero to a billion dollars in annual sales in less time.
Clearly, there was no limit in sight to this collaborative way of designing and implementing improvements. We could just go on working with executives through such collaborations to create new helpful solution after new helpful solution. That was our plan.
What are you doing to find the most talented executives and entrepreneurs with whom you can collaborate to make mutual profit breakthroughs?
If no existing group fits your needs, start your own!
Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
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