As my weekend ritual, I spent some time at the bookshop over the weekend. Scanning a long cascade of bookshelves I was interested by a title of book written by an Indonesian author titled “from Competing to Collaborating”. I ran through the book in a glance and found nothing special inside, so I did not buy it. As most Indonesian authors, they just don’t spend enough time to put valuable content into the pages behind an appealing title.
Anyway, that is not intention of my post. The tittle was something taking up my attention which last even to my sleep. Lately I have been seeing rough competition in every aspects of our life. Not only businesses with in-ethical TV commercial featuring harsh negative opinion against other brands, but also school children stealing to get better marks. As a start-up entrepreneur with a small business, I have a natural competitive mind which I learned from my past, I have to stand up the crowd at nearly any cost, including beating my competitors.
The title above, a very simple sentence of wisdom, taught me to see competitors from a different angle. Instead wasting energy on beating up our competitors to get our objectives, we collaborate to get our objective even better, faster, easier. If there is not enough cake up there for all of us, collaboration will include finding more to ensure all, together, get big enough slice. Of course it needs a lot of change in our mind-set, which may not be that easy as well. I guess the most important thing is instead of “getting all the cakes available out there for myself” we should think of “I’d like to have as much cake as needed to fill up my stomach, and will be happy of others can do too”.
I am lucky to have a friend who seems to be born with this mind set.
frankly i dont like competition, but collaborating to get what i want, why not?