A lot of people in the workplace find their careers held back by one great myth. They believe that you should not share information with your competitors. They treat tips and tricks like jealously guarded secrets bound up in an NDA, and never, ever share information with the competition across the road. And in the worst cases they will withhold information from other managers and teams in the same organisation. Sales won't talk to Marketing because, well careers are competitive aren't they?

 

And yet, if you take a closer look at the most successful and innovative organisations and industries you will find they are often the most open. Happily sharing industry knowledge with their their direct competitors and often sharing platforms and supply chains. There is a reason why industries like to get together at conferences and forums. And that reason is collective problem solving.

 

What those organisations and individuals have recognised is that when you share the same regulators, customers and markets as your rivals you have the opportunity to create an ecosystem with them that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Horizontal collaboration raises the water mark for everyone. When the industry as a whole becomes more efficient and credible, every individual player within it wins. And the same is true in careers. Other teams in your organisation are not your competition.

 

If your professional network exists entirely within the four walls of your current employer, your career trajectory and problem solving abilities are limited to that one organisation’s specific culture and limitations. You are stuck with what you know and what you know is just a tiny fraction of the wisdom of the crowd. 

Learning what works externally allows you to test fresh ideas and position you as an internal thought leader.

 

Try this little hack. Make a list of The Competition. Pick your top 5 rivals in your organisation with whom you are jockeying for credit and recognition. Add some notes about their strengths and weaknesses. Now cross out the heading and re-label the list The Cooperation. Work out how you can help them in addressing those weaknesses and maximising those strengths so that they can be more successful.

 

Here's some recent examples: 

 

Four of Europe’s biggest telco rivals—Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone—formed a joint venture to build digital advertising platform to compete with the data-monopolies of north American tech.  None of these telcos alone had enough data to compete with Big Tech. Together they created a massive network and kept advertising revenue within the European ecosystem.

 

AstraZeneca entered a strategic collaboration with CSPC Pharmaceutical Group to use AI for drug discovery in the treatment of chronic diseases. By sharing the risks and costs of platform development these competitors created the capability to identify medicines years faster than they could have alone.

IBM and Meta put aside their differences to create the AI Alliance. Co-opting governments and academics in the development of open standards to improve AI safety and test and catalogue the proliferation of tools coming to the market. If this improves consumer confidence in the safety and confidentiality of AI this will help both organisations grow in new markets.