The Power of Collaboration
Co-author: Devesh Gandhi
Once on a remote road, a big boulder came rolling down the mountain and blocked the road completely. Big machines couldn’t reach the location to move it. However, a man had some urgent work in the next town and he started trying to move it so that his vehicle could pass through, but he couldn’t. All the time and effort he did prove to be useless. After about an hour, a car reached the location. The people offered to help him as they were also going the same route. Together they successfully moved the big boulder in just a few minutes.
Many times, situations like this arise in our professional journey, where we are stuck in place because of a big obstacle. While we are always taught about consistency in our work, sometimes the situation demands something else. Some problems need unity, togetherness to make the journey a lot smoother. The destinations may be different but it doesn’t matter, it’s the connections you build and cheerful moments you experience through the collaborative journey of your organizations makes it important.
This pandemic has simply underlined the importance of collaborating with other businesses, to go the extra mile, and not just survive but thrive in difficult times. We are going to look at some examples from the history that will highlight how we should deal with such difficult situations.
Starbucks declared that they have lost 3.1 billion dollars in sales due to temporary store closures, modified operations, reduced hours, and reduced customer traffic. And now to overcome that problem they have started collaborating with other organizations to launch curbside pickup in several hundred existing locations and they are going to add over 50 Starbucks pick up locations in the next 12 to 18 months to meet evolving customer preferences that have accelerated because of COVID-19.
A similar strategy was adopted by the German Coca Cola Company back in 1940. As the Coca Cola syrup was not able to reach the bottling plant in Germany from the United States because of World War 2, plant manager Max Keith collaborated with local industries to procure raw material with which he could create a new drink. Using ingredients like apple fiber leftover from lollipop and whey from cheese making, Fanta was born. Today, Fanta is sold in over 180 countries.
Also, “Victoria’s Secret”, which once defined its legacy in women’s undergarments will now have a new owner, parent company L Brands released a statement saying a private equity firm will buy 55% of the company’s share because the company had a great loss and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now to again redefine their brand they have started collaborating with others to reinvent fashion and redesign the stores to make them more contemporary. The operating cost of company-owned or rented retail stores was much higher and was one of the main reasons for reaching this decision. However, if people at Victoria’s Secret had decided to create a new distribution model to collaborate with national garment shopping chains temporarily, it could have saved them.
In the time of the 2008 recession, many companies had to declare bankruptcy like Lehman Brothers. Also, the General Motors faced problems but due to government bailout loans, the automaker left its worst assets with “Old GM” and returned to the public markets in November 2010 with an offering where the treasury department still holds 32% of the share. These are the famous stories that we all know, but according to the information of a survey released by the Harward Business Review in one of its articles, the companies that had collaborated with other companies in the recession enjoyed stability and an upward graph of growth in the bad times.
In the year 1928, brothers Walt and Roy Disney introduced the world to Mickey Mouse via their short animated feature. A year later in 1929, Many Investors lost everything during the market crash because they assumed Wall Street’s good time was never going to end. Troubling times may be tough, but they knew that America needed a smile more than ever, and was able to navigate the challenges of the depression, so they started growing their business to the point where they could begin working on their first full-length animated feature right after the Great Depression ended. And from that time they never looked back and currently, they are one of the biggest producers in the world. They have never shied away from collaborating or buying other growing businesses from time to time where they are generating a huge profit.
Tech companies such as Slack and Uber were developed after 2008’s financial crisis, and now they are booming in the international market. Slack is a communications application for teams. To this date, the app has seen its concurrent users pass the 10 million mark, and consistently soared in millions, hitting 12.5 million. Not only this, but slack has also gained a leadership position in the coronavirus crisis.
Uber had started as an idea between two individuals who were unable to hail a cab on a chilly winter evening in Paris and now it became a tech behemoth with a valuation of $75.5 billion. Today Uber provides its service in nearly 600 cities across 65 countries where not only they are earning but the cab drivers also got a standardized platform from where they can take rides and earn good money hence a perfect example of how good collaboration can be and what can be achieved with it.
Today, we are observing companies like Google and Facebook investing in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio, which is a very good example of how the future would be shaped with collaborations. However, only time will answer what will happen at Jio in the future.
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