Competing ...

A rather interesting one about creating a knowledge-sharing company ... who can pass reading something with this kind of title? Which is why i changed the title to my post ... Well, the story told about GIant Eagle is quite informative.

This points out to an interesting thing ... most organizations do not have the policies and incentives to have people collaborate with each other. In fact, i like the way Russ Ross puts it ...

Now they’re competing in the marketplace of ideas.

And this is the basic difference. On the one hand, you have what some people call the "scarcity" mentality ... which is about scarcity of things going around. Which means that if there are two people, there is no way both of them can get what they need, there is some trade-off that needs to be made, and in the process of making this trade-off, either of them, or both, have to give up something they want. In fact, this is one of the basic assumptions classical economics is based upon, and this is something we have grown up with. The other is what people call the "abundance" mentality ... which is about their being enough for everyone's needs. As Mahatma Gandhi said, that there is enough for meet humanity's needs, not greed.

The question is, which mentality you subscribe to. In the knowledge sphere, of course, the "abundance" mentality seems more apt, but its not really possible to get people to actually move from one to the other with different contexts. Having said this, there is the whole idea of how an organizations can build up the environment to enable people to think abundance. This is not too difficult to do, actually ... what this requires is transparency, and removal of a threat perception ... though, as humans, we somehow find this is difficult to do.