COLLABORATION

I proudly worked at a global corporation for 17 years in Human Resources. During that time, we ran a research project with a group of Ph.D.’s at one of the largest and well recognized private Universities in México (Tecnológico de Monterrey). We provided the need for research and the University provided the research muscle regarding a common, challenging and frequently absent competency: Collaboration. The best understanding and meaning I found: “Collaboration is a human behavior, not a technology or a process but an act or series of acts that you choose to perform with one or more people… to accomplish a specific purpose or goal.” (David Coleman)

What we did was this—we built our own collaboration model based on Theory of Capitals of Francisco Javier Carrillo Ph.D. at the Center for Knowledge Systems, Tecnólogico de Monterrey, Mexico. We learned from it and applied it to a business project. That involved the necessary complexity, size, number of incumbents, production, logistics, sales and finance, with the clear intention to identify which capitals represent the main drivers and detonators of collaboration behaviors within the business culture.