Why do we collaborate? We do so because as individuals we can do a lot, but as members of a team we can achieve more.
Big or small teams can collaborate successfully, but only if everyone pulls together. They do it because the team will be more productive and individual members will grow with the team. They learn to build new relationships and trust one another. Not quite sold on collaboration? Then look at these powerful words and be inspired by the power of collaboration:
“As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.” Amy Poehler
l“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
“Politeness is the poison of collaboration.” Edwin Land
“There is no such thing as a self-made man. Oracle’s Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.” Larry Ellison
“I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.” Golda Meir
“Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative” Steve Jobs
“Collaborate with people you can learn from.” Pharrell
“Working with others is, in my mind, the future of business. You have a larger audience, more ideas, shared risk, shared workload and you will be getting a portion of something greater than had you done it alone.” Seth Nichol
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” Ryunosuke Satoro
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” Henry Ford
“One finger cannot lift a pebble.” Hopi proverb
“No individual can win a game by himself.” Pelé
“Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.” Brian Eno
“When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it’s you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.” Steven Spielberg
“Creating a better world requires teamwork, partnerships and collaboration, as we need an entire army of companies to work together to build a better world within the next few decades. This means corporations must embrace the benefits of cooperating together.” Simon Mainwaring
“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
“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Charles Darwin
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one that they sprung up.” Oliver Wendell Holmes
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” Reid Hoffman
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” Booker T Washington
“Alone we can do do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” Phil Jackson
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Isaac Newton
“The purpose in life is to collaborate for a common cause; the problem is nobody seems to know what it is.” Gerhard Gschwandtner
“The hardest problems of pure and applied science can only be solved by the open collaboration of the worldwide scientific community.” Kenneth G Wilson
Takeaway: A little inspiration goes far. Harness the power of collaboration and be amazed at what you can achieve together.