I am envious of Newark and I’ve never been there. I don’t want to live there either, but I wish I could bottle some of the collaborative magic that has transformed this city and bring it back to Joburg, my city that I love and hate - all at the same time.

By 2020, millennials will make up 50% of the workforce, and 88% of them currently say that they prefer an environment that is collaborative over one that's competitive.

Content and the re-emergence of email marketing are trends. Video content is a trend. Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) (1) is a trend. Collaboration is an era, it’s an economy and mostly it’s a global operating system.

The danger of a single story is the title of Chinamanda Adichie’s TED talk given in 2009, which a friend just shared. Adichie talks of the many single stories told of Africa where as a continent we’re thought of as a collection of poverty stricken, war torn regions waiting for the west to save us from ourselves.

Let’s start with the definition of ecology, which is the study of the interactions between living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) things.

I write this sitting on a plane having just left Bali en route to Singapore and then back to Johannesburg. I’ve just attended the Entrepreneur Institute Crystal Circle Conference at Vision Villas in Bali under the mentorship and facilitation of Roger Hamilton, creator or Wealth Dynamics and the Millionaire Masterplan.

Collaborative culture works for organisations whose leaders adopt by example and demonstrate the practice and the ethos. Does this mean that everyone has to agree and work together? Not at all. Competition and collaboration are not enemies and can co-exist very healthily, but lone rangers are damaging.

Graphic designed by www.freepik.com 

Many enterprises and organisations are managing just fine without collaboration. They continue to deliver value to shareholders and many continue with market dominance or sector leadership. So why would they invest time and money to build a collaborative culture?

Meaningful business decisions in the digital era will no longer be made by leaders behind closed doors, but via engagement across collaboration channels. That’s the view of Altimeter Group founder and CEO, Charlene Li.

While I have more or less followed the debate on the new visa regulations over the past months, an interview on 702 with David Frost of the Tourism Business Council of South Africa, really highlighted the damage being caused and the impact on job losses, not only to the tourism sector directly but to the broader sectors that benefit.