Catalyzing Success through Collaborative Advantage

There are some people that make their work just another thing they have to do, and there are those that make their work something that they want to do. Welcome to Working on Purpose with your host Elise Cortez. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration from those people who have found deeper meaning and personal connection to their work life. It's beyond nine to five. It's working on Purpose. Now Here is your host, Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose Show. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I'm your host, Elise Cortes, joining from Dallas, Texas, which is home base for me. If you've been tuning in for a while, you know this program is all about helping people create more meaningful and purposeful lives and equipping leaders insight organizations to cultivate meaning and purpose that elicits passion inspired contribution, innovation, and persevering performance. I talk with my guests to draw on their expertise and share my own experience consultings developing workforces across the globe. Every week. In these conversations, I hope you walk away with something you can immediately put to use in your life or your work. And if I can do anything to help you along that journey. Go to my website at a least Cortez dot com and use the contact me feature tip to message me. Now, let's open a dialogue and explore what's going on for you and how I might be able to help needy rate. I'm glad we're connected and thanks for listening with us. This week is Paul Skinner. He's the author of Collaborative Advantage, How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success. He is the founder of the Agency of the Future, which helps clients create collaborative advantage to drive organizational success, and as founder of the social enterprise Pimp My Cause, he and the platform bring together marketers and good causes to create transformational probone of projects for social good. Today we'll be talking about why collaborative advantage is so important to success and walk through five steps of his outside in framework, and also hear about some inspiring examples of how he harnesses collaborative advantage in his own work. He joins today from London, England. Paul, Welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you very much at LISA. I've been very much looking forward to a conversation me too. And as I told you, I read your book from cover to cover, and I got so much out of it for myself, and I'm really, honestly very excited about how that's going to change my own direction. So I really want to thank you for coming into my world and really giving me something beautiful. Thank you, Thank you very much. That's wonderful to hear. Yes, Yes, isn't it nice to know that all the effort that you put into writing that book actually made a difference to at least one person on the planet, that being me. It is you know, the world is becoming such a surprising place, and I think some of the most interesting things we can do are the things that we do that increase our exposure to positive surprises. And I think that's probably one of the most fun things about having written the book on collaborative advantage of some of the messages that I get from people that otherwise I would have had no connection to soever. And so for me, it's been a vehicle for increasing the number of positive surprises that come my way, which I think is a magical experience. It is a magical experience, and I love how you said that, Paul. It's a great way to start and from there. One. There are so many pearls I got from your book that I wanted to talk about, but one, let's open if we can you talk about one of the greatest problems facing humanity, like poverty and climate change and political violence and mass migration, all those really big, hairy, messy problems may ultimately be entirely dependent for the resolution on our capacity for cooperation and our ability to create collaborative advantage, maybe our best strategic capability as a species. What an incredibly alluring thing to say, can we start there? Well, that's very kind of you, and I think that's true, and I think it's actually for all of us. So a lot of the problems that you cited just there are big, cross cutting societal issues that no one government, no one country, no one part of the world can solve on their own. But I think it's increasing increasingly the case for all of us and for businesses of any size, that we're increasingly coming up against problems that reach across our core capabilities, and that perhaps we don't have the fullest competence within our own experience or within our own organizations to address. I'm not sure, was it Benjamin Franklin who said that the key to success is to look for the opportunities in every problem. And I think today, in the light of some of the big, complex challenges that you cite, you know, perhaps the advanced version of that technique is to look for the opportunities, both for ourselves and others in the problems that we face. And hopefully our conversation around collaborative advantage will open the door to that a little bit wider. There's so much in that what you just said, Paul, And yes, we certainly cannot solve any problem on our own, let alone the big ones that we just talked about before. And so what I think is so compelling about what you've written is we all heard about competitive collaborative competition. But when you talk about collaborative advantage as being able to beat competition, I just think that's really really compelling. So for our listeners who haven't yet read the book, would you distinguish what you mean by a collaborative advantage. So, collaborative advantage, as I propose it is the business advantage that comes from better harnessing the fuller value creating potential that lies outside as well as inside our own business. So it's about working with our customers and other stakeholders as opposed to just for our customers and against our competitors, and so as search it is, as you say, it's a radical alternative to the conventional goal of creating competitive advantage, which has largely been about creating success from within a business through our own performance. And I propose that collaborative advantage can be a greatly accelerated path to growth. M I know that we're going to talk about this little bit later when we talk about what you've been up to uniquely in the world. But where did this come from for you? Paul? I mean, how did you start to really see? Because to me, this is a very unique lens on the world. Where did this come from for you? So I suppose, in terms of my own influences, two things that are very important to me every day. First of all, I have a daily practice of meditation, and secondly, my background is working as a as a professional marketer. So in a sense, I think a lot of my ideas on collaborative advantage have been born of the interplay between those two experiences apps enjoying in meditation a daily experience of a more unified state of awareness maybe gives rise to a natural inclination to find more unifying ways of working. And just as an aside, since you jump into the topic, I wonder speculatively if when we meditate we create collaborative advantage with ourselves. So in a sense, listeners may find this a part of their common experience as well. It's quite difficult to choose to have a good idea from within an individual stream of conscious thought. Most of our valuable ideas probably somehow pop up in the spaces between our thoughts in an emergent way. And I think when we meditate we create a bigger space for those kind of value creating ideas to emerge. And it may be that if we get more used to the process of greater value coming from the spaces within our own thoughts, that more naturally opens the door to us recognizing that greater value still comes from the spaces between me and you. Greater value still comes from the spaces between one organization and another. You know, Greater value is created still in the space between a business and its customers and its partners and other stakeholders and so on. This may be far ahead of topic or off topic, but something that has really influenced me is the Vedic concept of leela. So Lela is a Sanskrit word that means the divine play through which oneness manifests itself in the universe as the diversity of creation in order to enjoy the process of rediscovering itself as oneness. And I think in some way I try to enjoy that experience in meditation, but then it naturally overflows into working activity. And I think that creating collaborative advantage is a very wildly, a very practical, and very business orientated way for me to become part of something bigger than myself and to help client organizations achieve greater success by becoming something bigger than theirselves as well. Paul, you're going to make me cry. It's so beautiful. What you're saying is deliriously delicious in every way. And I mean, I had breakfast, yet this is amazing. This is better than breakfast. I love what you're saying, Paul. And no, we're not going off track at all. We're going right into the space that I want to dwell in. And that brings us me to what you're when you talk about being part of our contributing to something bigger than yourself. I have to go then to the space of purpose and so connect for us if you will. What does collaborative advantage have to deal with purpose? Well, collaborative advantage proposes a new purpose or a new endpoint for strategy itself. So it's a new goal for business strategy. And it also provides us with a toolkit that can help us to understand and define the purpose of our own businesses in a new way. The better to mobilize around those purposes, and the better to grow our businesses, and the better to scale the impact of our nonprofits. And I would say, in some ways, it's a very simple idea. You know, I would say that business has always been essentially an act of cooperation. You know, if I'm in business and you're my customer, then if I'm not doing something that in some way helps you to improve your life, we could ask why I'm in business in the first place. Equally, if I'm not providing it in a way that, through some kind of exchange, enables me to sustain and grow that business, then how can I exist in business in the first place. But it so happens that almost certainly the most influential idea in the history of ideas about business strategy. The idea of competitive advantage has come to so dominate our thinking about how you create success in business that it has come to overshadow that essentially cooperative nature to business. And my hope is that we can use collaborative advantage to restore human purpose to the particular stories that we tell ourselves in the form of our organizational strategies, and to better hard this our innate capacity for cooperation as a means for fulfilling that purpose. Sounds really good to me. I'm in awesome my best recruit, right, absolutely, absolutely, I'm so in for that. Well, let's do this if we can, Paul, I think it's interesting. And when I was reading your book, I really got way more present to the idea of the notion of how we've really embraced competitive competition in our world. So what is if you will, we've been so conditioned to embrace competitive advantage, what are its limitations? Well, I should say so other people have criticized the concept of competitive advantage before me, and then I've brought my own distinct criticism to bear own it. So some people have pointed out that it's too often a zero sum game. If I'm looking to compete with you, then my natural inclination is to try to replicate what you're doing, but to offer more of it for less. You can ultimately just extract value from our businesses. Others have pointed out that it's too often been used to prioritize shareholder value in a way that may have been too often to the active detriment of broader stakeholder value. Financial analysts have argued that the length of time that you can hold on to a competitive advantage has diminished at an ever accelerating rate since the idea was first introduced. And then you have people like Kim and Mobourne, who wrote the Blue Ocean Strategy series of books, who argue, I think quite convincingly that the biggest changes and the biggest disruptions we're likely to face probably don't come from our competitors anyway. And what I would add to that is the notion that the idea of competition and competitive advantage creates a perception, whether we're deliberately buying into it or whether it's just infiltrated our assumptions, it creates a perception of the relationship between the business and the environment in which we operate, which causes value to be left on the table. So it too readily reinforces the idea that it is we inside the business who create value. It's our performance that counts, and the people exist primarily outside the business of relevance to us, either as competitors seeking to capture that value or as customers, who I believe we too readily reduce to the idea of consumers, which is probably the single word in the whole of the English language that I most detest, because it seems to imply that our customers human agency can be restricted to their capacity to diminish by a few units the world supply of whatever resource we happen to be selling them, whereas I would say that we do well to remember that at any point in time, it is almost certainly our customers who are the people who are doing the very most to improve their own lives. And so perhaps our purpose in business can be best understood as finding the right ways to make it quicker or easier, or more effective, or even as you say, more magical, for them to do that. And what I want to endorse about that, Paul, I really appreciate how you've distinguished that for us. It's just stunningly beautiful. And also it speaks to what you say in your book about just really encouraging and embracing human agency. And I really appreciate that as a person who have studied psychology and sociology. Human agency gets to how we get things done, and how what you're saying is we're enabling people to do what they're already doing in life or can do for themselves. And I think that is such a brilliant way to look at how we are serving our customers in a different way than I think we probably have been for a long time. Thank you. Yes, I think that that aspect is incredibly important, and it also opens the door to such a diverse range of knowledge and techniques to help us achieve that. One legacy of competitive advantage perhaps is the whole idea of change management. And so change management takes as an assumption that the important change is the change that takes place within our business, but actually, if we think about human agency and unlocking the human agency of our customers, we realize that the most important change is the change that we can enable outside the business, and so that opens the door to us finding techniques from such a diverse range of fields from psychology to the nonprofit world, and finding all sorts of new perspectives on how do we accelerate that process of change. There is so much there. Paul and I want to hold that thought. We want to grab our first break here and then I want to get into your outside in framework. I'm your host, Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with Paul Skinner, who's the author of Collaborative Advantage, How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success. We've been talking about how he's able to distinguish this concept from competitive advantage. After the break, we'll get into his outside in framework. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Alise Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose if you're just joining us. My guest is Paul Skinner. He's the author of Collaborative Advantage, How collaboration Beats competition as a strategy for success. He's also the founder of the Agency of the Future, which helps clients create collaborative advantage to drive organizational success. And he is the founder of the social enterprise Pimp My Cause, which brings together marketers and good causes to create transformational pro bono projects for social good I'm your host Elise Cortez. So Paul, for this next section, before we talk about your outside in framework, I just I want to also share with you that as I read your book for me, I was so excited because your concepts open to space for me to be able to see that employ what you do really opens. What you're suggesting that we do opens a whole new world for people to live and execute on their purpose. And so I come across people who get access to and discover their purpose and they feel so overwhelmed by it because it's so big and they're just they feel like they're just too small to fulfill it. And so it seemed to me that by by employing collaborative advantage, we actually may see a way to fulfill our purpose. And that's what the big amazing gift that I got from reading your book gave me. So let's give it to our listeners as well and talk about your outside in framework and talk about the first step if you will, And I see it as step one is really a way to understand and seeing what purpose is in a new light. So can you start with your with your step one of your framework, yes, of course, and picking up on your point about individuals wanting to achieve their purpose and feeling overwhelmed when we come we may come back to talking about the social enterprise I found it might cause at some point in the conversation. But one of the impulses to create that was to find a way to multiply my own impact a thousandfold, and so collaborative advantage, I think is something that we can use to create new initiatives at any scale. It's certainly not just for large organizations, but the outside in framework, as you say, is a tool to grow any business of any size, in any sector. And the first step is the most crucial and the most fundamental, and as you suggest, it relates to purpose. The step is finding common purpose. And I propose that if we accept the premise that our primary value creators are our customers, then it makes sense to find common purpose by beginning not with our organizational purpose, but with their purpose, and making that common by unifying around that purpose. So this can come from asking ourselves or from moving away from competitive questions such as what do we do best as a business and towards collaborative questions such as what do we enable people to do better? So just to bring that to life with an example that we all know and almost certainly have all used at some point, if not on a very regular basis, Amazon. When Amazon launched the first online bookstore, in a sense, they subverted the conventional competitive model of a shop, which is I have stuff and I try to sell you my stuff better than the shop next door, and instead they replace that with the collaborative proposition I'm here to enable you to choose. I don't mind what you choose. If I don't have it, I'll find a way to get it to you. And that collaborative premise is at the heart of their business model, at the heart of their now over two hundred thousand global global retail partnerships to this day. And so Step one is unique in that it's about making a fundamental switch away from seeing our business as a deliverer of change and towards seeing our business or our organization as an enabler of change. And that switch changes the nature of the business that we're in and how we see it and can open the door two different parts of growth. As a result, I want you to know, Paul, that I have changed the way I language, how I talk about what I do, precisely because of what you just said. I no longer say that I'm delivering something. I'm enabling something in people. And I want to thank you for contributing that to my world. Thank you. That's beautiful. Yeah, it is beautiful. Okay. So that's step one, finding common purpose. Step two is creating opportunities. M So, once you've defied the purpose that you're seeking to enable, the next step, as you say, is to create the right opportunities for people to pursue that purpose. So step two is about making our whole innovation program more useful to people pursuing that activity or that purpose. And so that can be about putting powerful cooperation enabling ideas at the heart of our customer value propositions, at the heart of our value creation process itself and who we work with to create that value. It can be about putting them at the heart of our business models or our forms of service delivery or customer support. Maybe just to give one example of it being at the heart of a customer value proposition, let's take gyms for example. So you might say that the typical gym is not necessarily on the side of its members, because often gyms are quite happy if we become a member of the gym, but a turn up, in fact, it leaves them quite profitable. One chain of gyms in the Netherlands decided to be much more on the side of its customers and develop the proposition train more pay less. So they have a monthly subscription and every time you go into train, they take one, in their case euro of that month's subscription price. To the point where literally, if you were to go in every day, you would train for free. And by demonstrating that they're really on the side of their customers in getting into shape, they've won the trust and love of their customers. They've expanded right across the Netherlands. They're now expanding into the countries around the Netherlands, and of course having earned their customers trust, they can also supply them with other valuable products and services and really grow that movement of creating change through fitness. Looks beautiful, Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate that the examples really help us get access to these ideas, Paul. The Amazon example just really the way you distinguish that an open that force is gorgeous, and I didn't as a person who's about to go to the gym later on today, it made me think about the idea of how to really be on the side of customers in a very different way. So step three then is engage participation. So that is a lot to do with designing an environment which is conducive to the particular purpose that you're enabling. And in the book, one of the things I look at is the concept of extended cognition, which implies that our choices and decisions are so heavily influenced by the context and the environment in which we take them that it is almost as if our choices are structured in our environment more than they are structured inside our own minds. And so I would suggest, for example, that's why it's very difficult to judge people from history in the light of our contemporary values, because it is very difficult for us to know how we would have behaved and what decisions we would have taken if we'd been in their shoes at the time. And so step three can be about making sometimes big, sometimes subtle changes to our physical environment, our social environment, the environment inside the business or organization, or the external environment in which we're operating, which are conducive to the purpose we're supporting. So do you have one example, as you suggest, that's quite fun From the book, there is an example of a wine shop that was able to sell more bottles of French wine simply by putting French music on in the background. And one of the things that was quite intriguing about that is that it worked especially well on the customers who when leaving the shop. And we're asked about the music, replied that they could swear that it wasn't playing when they were in there. It's delightful. And you know what I'm also getting here, Paul, which is so beautiful. I'm really getting the threads, the interconnected threads of what you're describing, going back to what you said before about how the ideas maybe even emerge from your experience of meditating and then being a marketer. And I'm starting to see all the interconnectivity of what you're distinguishing for us, and it's almost overwhelming, but beautiful. Thank you. I think it has emerged into a worldview that has certainly enhanced my own agency and being able to help people build ambitious solutions to complex problems. And I think another point that comes out of your observation is that this is a very organic process. So the steps that I'm taking you through are five steps of outside but in reality, we can pull on any of those steps simultaneously, and it may not just be a linear process. It may be a more organic process that I'm simplifying by showing it in the form of five steps. And to that point, Paul, I absolutely do want to acknowledge one of the things that really stunned me about your book is that you have boiled down to something that's something that is very very large and beautiful and enveloping into something that we can digest, we can get our arms around. And what I know, because I've done a little bit of writing, is that it really takes something and to be able to produce something that's that clear, to let us into that space where we can distinguish it and see it for ourselves, really takes, frankly a brilliant writer. And I want to acknowledge you for that beautiful contribution. Well, that means a huge amount to me because in writing the book, for me, the most important act of collaborative advantage was the collaborative advantage between me and the reader. You know, the purpose of the book isn't to provide a great book. The purpose of the book is to make it easier for you to take advantage of and use and creating your own way the best of anything that my experience so far can offer. And what you said before and you did, and what you said before about enabling people to forget exactly how you said it was beautiful to unleash their ambitious motivations I forget how you said that, right, don't. That's what we're What I'm up to is I want to be able to enable more people to be able to discover and express their purpose into the world so that it makes a difference the way that they want to and for you to be able to give us something that enables us to be able to do that in a bigger way. I'm so grateful to be able to share that with my listeners. Thank you. So with that step four, iterate and accelerate. So that step is about mainstreaming the purpose that we're enabling, and that comes from working with our early adopters and strongest supporters, looking at how they behave in practice, as opposed to what they say they'll do, what we think they'll do, or what classical economics tells us they should do, adapting to their needs as a result, and also using their powerful influence to reach a broader mainstream of customers or stakeholders. So to give one example, where Netflix launched, they had a queue system which was not very successful, and it turns out the reason for that is that we are more aspirational for our future selves than for our current selves. So we might come from home from work, feeling tired and think to ourselves, next week, oh, what's Richard the Third? But for tonight Lucy will do. And then of course we get home from work next week and we're scratching our heads and thinking no, come to think of it, I also had quite a hard day to day, so maybe I'm not quite ready for Richard the Third, And so that's why Netflix switched to the system of showing you what other people who also liked Lucy then went on to watch. In practice, m that's fascinating, that's very fascinating. And I do certainly we know what many organizations when we think about them, that maybe came into the market with one idea and realized, h, that's not what people really want. And if and if we can be present to and adapt to what we're hearing from their feedback, and as you say, partner with them, collaborate with them, it can produce a whole different set of offerings. And how exciting is that? Absolutely? And one point, by the way, since you since you raise it using their influence, often the value of a and you know, people think of a brand as something that you can choose, and that's its value. I would say that brands also play perhaps a more valuable role, not so much in enabling us to choose, but enabling us to reveal our choices to each other. That's more valuable for us because a lot of our choices fundamentally are influenced by how we wish to appear to and engage with the people around us. And it's also more valuable to the brand manufacturers because perceived usage for a species as socialist humans is actually a far greater influence over us than advertising or formal recommendations or anything of the sort. And that also really goes to what you do beautifully in the book, Paul, in terms of really helping us distinguish for ourselves as human beings, just how much we are in the driver's seat of our life, and are it just It gives us something to stand from, to be able to, as you say, help us understand our choices versus feeling like maybe they've been foisted upon us. Yes, absolutely absolutely, and that takes us back to human agency. Yes, exactly where I was going. And so if we can before the break, would you distinguish for us your step five build partnerships? So that is about helping us to scale further and faster than we could alone. You know, when I was writing the book, I came across a wonderful line from Antwinders cent Exuperre, who wrote that the perfect partnership is based not on looking at each other, but on looking in the same direction. And so three ingredients I suggested in the book for great partnerships are first of all, a good shared understanding of the end user purpose you're enabling. Secondly, a good alignment of the interests of the organizations around that purpose, and thirdly, as a result, the ability to adapt over time. And in the book, I look at different categories of partnership, ranging from what you might call partnerships of unlikely bedfellows, where very different organizations come together free from competitive instincts, right through to what you might call marriages of convenience, where businesses come together who, in other circumstances might not be particularly concerned by each other's prosperity, but where they recognize that only by working together can they achieve sufficient scale in some way to best enable that induce a purpose. When I hear that, and I know we're going to talk about this a little bit later, I just think about all the possibilities of really addressing those big, hairy problems in the world that really we do need all of us to come together to be able to address. And it opens a whole different space. Pots It's like, it's almost as if you know, it's like you're turning your head upside down in terms of how you see the world. And I just I feel like it gives us such a different space to be able to see opportunity and even ourselves in the world and how we dance with it. Yes, some of the inspiration for outside in actually came from having coffee opposite the Saint George Pompidoux at a time when I was in Paris, and so that building, in case people are familiar with it, it takes the structural and functional aspects of the building, the escalators, the air ducts and so on, that would normally be hidden away inside and it puts them on the outside of the building. And it struck me that that was a good visual metaphor for how things like open innovation work. But then it struck me that actually we need to go further than that. It's not good enough to simply put the insides of a business on the outside. The greatest value can be created by starting with the value that's created in the whole wide world around us, and then find the right way to work with and through that value from within the business. And that was the more anecdotal inspiration behind the outside in framework. I would love to live inside that beautiful mind of yours, Paul. And with that, let's grab our last break. I'm Elise Cortez, your host. We were on the air with Paul Skinner, who is the author of Collaborative Advantage, How Collaboration Beats Competition as a strategy for success. He joined today from London, England. We've been talking about his outside in framework. After the break, we're going to talk about how he applies this idea into his own life and his work. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Alice Cortez as a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose. If you're just tuning in. My guest is Paul Skinner. He's the author of Collaborative Advantage, How Collaboration Beats competition as a strategy for success. He is the founder of the Agency of the Future, which helps clients create collaborative advantage to drive organizational success. And he is also the founder of the social enterprise Pimp My Cause, which brings together marketers and good causes to create transformational pro bono projects for social good I'm your host, Elise Cortez as so for this last section or segment, Paul, I really wanted to talk about really how you bring this into the world, how this shows up for you, and how you express it. So we've talked about the two things that you're up to there, but I want to understand and help our listeners understand what does your work mean to you personally, and how do you understand your own purpose? Well, I mean in a sense that takes us back to the whole concept of Vada Leida and finding a way to become bigger than myself. You know, it's quite interesting. I guess few people would readily associate the notions of marketing and vocation. But collaborative advantage has been a way for me to turn marketing into my vocation and to make it something more useful to myself and others than it might otherwise have been. In a sense, marketing is to collaborative advantage what finance was to compare advantage, and so it's a way of making the tools of my own profession as useful and valuable to the world around me as I'm able to. And so in that sense, it has become a real vocation for me. You know what's beautiful about that is I really appreciate so much that all of your language and what you just said about really making a difference to and being of service to others. How can I be of greater service to other people? What I've learned in the work that I do, Paul, is that I meet so many people they ache to matter. That's what they're aching for is to make a difference in the world. And what I so appreciate about finding you and reading your book is that you're giving people access to do that. Yes, that's exactly my intention. Collaborative advantage has to begin by having an idea that is bigger than yourself. And I think one of the limitations of competitive advantage will have a strategy that is led by finance, is that if it doesn't have that bigger picture to fit into, it becomes too inward looking, it becomes too self serving, and of course, ultimately that means it fails to attract the level of support that it might otherwise have achieved. So collaborative advantage is not an altruistic approach to strategy. It's I hope, an enlightened approach to strategy which recognizes that it's about creating the best possible connection between you, your business, and the world around you. Beautiful beautifully said too. And to that end, we have just a little bit of time left, I want to make sure that we share with our listeners what you're doing at the Agency of the Future and how you're using collaborative advantage through that. So the Agency of the Future is all about collaborative advantage. So it's through the Agency of the Future that I help organizations to grow more quickly, to achieve their goals more ambitiously, perhaps to set more ambitious goals in the first place to achieve And so it's absolutely symbiotic with the book, and the ideas in the book have been developed through my own practice at the Agency of the Future, and in a sense, the book makes those ideas accessible for the first time to a much broader audience, as well as hopefully playing a role in reaching some members of that broader audience that would also like to come back to the Agency of the Future to accelerate their approaches to grace. Through the Agency of the Future, we help clients tackle all sorts of problems. We've worked with recently with a world leading renewable energy business on how to power greater positive change in the world. We've worked with institutions of international governance on how to enable more collaborative and more society wide approaches to dealing with disasters and complex emergencies. We've worked at looking to explore how to better adapt to the needs and the Agency of aging populations and so on. So collaborative advantage I've discovered to be really useful to any organization of any size in any sector. You know, Paul, one of the things that I say when I'm out speaking is I often will open my talk with and ask the audience one question, and that is, what will you do with your one precious life? And it strikes me that you are doing magnificent things with your one precious life, and you're helping others to do the same. I think that's one of the kindest things anyone's overset me. Oh you're gonna make me cry. It's good though, I'm good. I'm fine. Beautiful, it's beautiful. So to that, to that, and let's hear about this beautiful social enterprise pimp my Cause. Talk again about you duplicating yourself over and over again and making a difference. And I really want to relate that since you've really picked up on this idea of human agency, on to find a way to circle back to that. So Pimp my Cause came from the fact that I had enjoyed offering my marketing skills to particular charities and social enterprises that I believe in and I found, first of all, that that was both useful for them and very rewarding and useful for me. It enabled me to diversify my experience, to try out new roles, to increase my influence, to find out more about particular subjects that really interested me, and that most of my opportunities to do that had come about in quite random ways. So I wondered if there would be a way to essentially multiply my own impact a thousand fold by making those kind of opportunities more systematically available across the marketing profession as a whole. So that's why we created pimpmo Cause, which works rather like the online dating of pro bono marketing, and which connects professional marketers with charities and social enterprises that they can support with their marketing talent and enhance their own marketing capabilities in the process. And we also run talent development programs where we coach whole brand teams for blue chip marketing teams by giving them live charity briefs that relate to their particular talent development priorities and coaching them through those briefs in a way that they create marketing resources that are transformational for a whole range of charities and social enterprises, so that creates a positive legacy and which really gives them an opportunity to develop a new level of leadership and capability in their own marketing as a process. And I just want just thinking to late that to human agency because it had struck me a few weeks ago. Something that is going to sound very negative, that the two and a half thousand charities we support don't improve people's lives, that our marketers don't improve our causes, and that our talent development programs don't improve our marketing, but that actually these are three very good things, because first of all, by and large, most of our causes are not so much improving their beneficiaries lives as doing something much better than that, which is to create a context or provide particular types of support that empower them to improve their own lives. And that's so important because that distinction gets to the heart of how they unlock not a one off change, but a self perpetuating change. And then, of course our marketers and the course of our programs don't have time to change their charity partner's fortunes, but they do have the time and opportunity to create valuable marketing resources with them that the cause leaders can use to enhance their own outcomes for months and often for years to come. And many charities will say that the reason they still exist as an organization is because they've participated in these programs and had that support. And then for the marketers participating in these talent development programs, you know, marketing is one of those things where you gain advantage not just from doing better marketing, but from having a better and a better idea about what marketing is and what it can be used to achieve in the first place. And our programs often create a space for our marketers to tell themselves an upgraded story about who they are, what they can achieve, and what the people around them can achieve. And often that experience will stay with them and it's the development of their career through many levels of promotion to come. Paul, that so elevates any one of us who are listening to that what you've done here and it's so beautiful and what you're what you're explaining to us is is really what my experience is is you have empowered me and enabled me to see who I can become in this world. And what I can what I can accomplish with a whole new set of eyes, And you have contributed to me greatly because of that, and I believe absolutely to our listeners as well. Thank you, Thank you so with in our final little bit of time here, what would you like to leave our listeners with? Well, so I've listened to your show many times, and so each episode I found very inspiring. So that means that your listeners are DEFECTO must if they've been listening to your show be very inspired people, and so they no doubt all have their own changes that they're working on. A lot of people have enjoyed Gundi's advice to be the change that you want to see in the world. But I think something that really fits with the themes that you've picked up on in our conversation is that perhaps with collaborative advantage, we have the opportunity to deploy an even more ambitious version of that technique in terms of not just being the change that we want to see in the world, but enabling the change we want to see in the world, and to do so at scale. And of course, since I'm a proponent of collaborative advantage, I just don't just want to give a final message to your listeners. I'd also love to hear one back. So I'm sure many of your listeners are working on their own examples of collaborative advantage, and I would love to hear about them. I'd love to hear about what they're achieving, what obstacles they're going up against, how they're overcoming those challenges, and so on. And maybe the next time I'm talking about collaborative advantage, I'll be using the example of one of your listeners. Brilliant. I absolutely invite the same. I would love to be inspired by hearing what art listeners are up to in the world. And with that, Paul, thank you so much for showing for sharing your beautiful gift of yourself with us. I have gotten so much from reading your book and being in conversation with you, and I look forward to further collaborative advantaged conversations with you. Thank you, Elise. If you want to learn more about Paul his book Collaborative Advantage, how collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success, or his work in the Agency of the Future, or what he's up to at pip My Cause, start by visiting the A of THEO dot com. So really it's t h E aof dot com, the A of O. Excuse me, that is that right, Paul, the aof so taof dot com. I'm also on Twitter, I Paul Skinner and people can find and pip my Cause at Pip my Cause. Wonderful, Thank you, Paul, my pleasure. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in to Working on Purpose, featuring your host Alice Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, find your life's purpose at work