Thinking More About Collaboration

I saw an amazing movie this past weekend directed by Tom Shadyac, the director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Bruce Almighty, among others, called “I Am”. It is a documentary about his search for the purpose of life after a near fatal bicycle accident. He interviews a group of amazing intellectuals: Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Lynne McTaggart, Elisabet Sahtouris, Howard Zinn, and Thom Hartmann to get their views. He talked a great deal about one of my favorite words in the world: Collaboration. It showed many instances where we now understand how the animal kingdom make democratic decisions (i.e. collaborative decisions) by majority votes such as the changing direction of a flock of birds or a herd of gazelles. Most of us had presumed that it was a “follow the dominant leader or alpha-male” type thing.  The movie suggests that because we humans are a social species and are more suited towards collaboration like other social animals exhibit, rather than ruling by domination (which our human history reflects). Some people suggest that women are more inclined to be more collaborative than men. That is exactly what this blog by Jean Brittingham suggests – “Why the World Needs A More Feminine Version of Success”. However, I disagree that this is only a feminine trait; I know a great deal of men, including my brother, and lucky-for-me several of my male bosses, who are extremely collaborative and open in the work environment. While others, think that we will see more of a collaborative environment from different generations in our society: A Forbes article by Bill Patterson from MicrosoftDynamics wrote “Gen Y and the collaborative workplace”. He basically argues that due to modern day technology after the Dot.com era, young people growing up with all of today’s social technology are typically more collaborative than the generation that grew up with only personal computers. I can see a lot of truth to this as I watch my two daughters grow up in this environment.

Although, I have switched careers from a research scientist to an entrepreneur, I found that my favorite thing about both careers is the collaboration with others. As a scientific researcher, my experience shows that I basically collaborated on nearly everything I worked on, including proposal writing, research projects, publishing papers, publishing books, presentation writing, product design, forums, etc. Not only does collaborating with a group of people make it way more fun, but more importantly very innovative! I truly believe that collaboration is a key source of innovation for the specific reason of capturing many different perspectives towards a single goal.

Designing and producing handbags has not changed my level of collaboration. I continue to collaborate with my local partners, business mentors, national celebrities, and more.  I am extremely excited about our latest collaboration with our regional Dress For Success Charity; we will be holding a design-party next week on the design of this new handbag, bringing together several ideas and requirements from our target customer base of professional women. I will update the blog to reflect the outcome of this exciting and innovative evening.

xo, Gigi