The importance of dots connecting

What is the essence of business? Getting someone’s money for the value you provide? Perhaps. Is that all? Is there something else that drives us forward even when money is out of the equation (for lack/abundance of it)?

Using creativity to “connect the dots” in your business environment is one of the essential talents and fine-tuned skills that bring companies to smart success. Creating the product/service and selling is marvelous, but where do the actual long-term synergy and success come from? What is the spark that boosts your efforts and brings you from 5 people team to an internationally recognised stakeholder? Some of the ingredients of that sauce are brought to you below:

• Seeing the big picture

A company is like a forest. In order to see the whole forest, you need to see as many trees as possible. Just like in order to understand the entire idea/concept, you need to connect as many dots as possible.

You have to gather data — reach the hill, higher ground, fly just below the clouds or something similar. We need to be able to see the big picture, an overall landscape of opportunities, good news, dangers, fires, animals, bulldozers killing trees and all the other stakeholders and events going on in the forest. And when we have the whole overview — we need to be able to get into the woods, to distinguish the fires, to talk with the bulldozer drivers and the decision-makers that run them, to plant new trees, to water the remaining plants — to cherish and exponentially grow the forest we focus on.

In order to do that, constant flexibility between the bird's perspective (seeing the whole forest) and the frog’s perspective (seeing the forest from within) is of utmost importance. It is essential. It allows us to grow the forest in the current area, and find ways to make it flourish in the new grounds, in the future.

In order to excel, we continuously have to bring in new trees to the forest, find new sources of water, better adjust to the weather conditions and even influence them, with time and effort, continuously. The same is with the companies. Strategic partnerships are one of the key enablers of these steps, making it faster and easier for everyone included.

• Having an amazing and well-connected team

Strategic partnerships are all around us, not just between companies, but also within our teams.

Strategic partnerships are not just expensive deals made between international corporations, they are also those wonderful connections made between the persons in the departments in our own teams — communication flows, speeding-up the processes, establishing a way to increase transparency inside the team across all departments, building social capital among the team members, enabling synergy and creativity to flourish among them — all of these points are, so-called “internal strategic partnerships” that can bring your team from “just a company” to a perfectly fine-tuned, super-charged organism ticking like a Swiss clock!

• Having an extraordinary support network of people, companies and organisations

Provide value. Get knowledge. Share knowledge. Get opportunities. Share opportunities. Create the network of people who know the value of your team and the value of the service/product you provide, who trust you and are willing to support what you do. And then — support them even more!

How can you do that? How can you create such a network? Sometimes it seems as a long, tedious, a bit abstract process…

It is quite simple, but the alignment of values and consistency is the key. Be the first one to share! And there is always something useful to share. In any phase of career path or company development, we all had the chance to receive advice or support by someone we never met before or who had no benefit from supporting us at the time. Be that person for someone else, for those that share the same values as you do and for those who have the “sharing” mindset.

Expect nothing in return — it is not about the give&get ratio! It is about creating synergy.

With a network of sharing-oriented mindsets, it is much more difficult for any culture, company or individual to go in the wrong direction. Results and examples keep confirming this all over the world and it is a pleasure to witness it.

• Strategic partnerships at Ministry of Programming

With 80+ products in the portfolio so far, 1200%+ growth in 5 years, partners from 11 countries and 150+ team members all over the world, MoP journey is a pretty fascinating one. We are currently focusing our strategic partnerships efforts on:

• Supporting the sustainable growth of the company,
• Bringing new opportunities to scale and expand,
• Contributing to the core initiatives of business development, marketing and talent acquisition,
• Boost the bonds with the local, regional and international entrepreneurial communities,
• Enhancing the local, regional and global impact of Ministry of Programming.

Future seems very promising at MoP and we are looking forward to sharing our steps with you as we go!

At the end, I would like to share a quote of one of the persons who influenced the tech world significantly:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” — Steve Jobs