Nokia’s IdeasProject features visionary and influential thought leaders on communications technology. In this clip, John Hagel of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge suggests two often-overlooked ways to facilitate rapid learning and growth. First, Hagel says, examine your relationship with your top business partners to see if both of you are learning as fast as possible. Second, be sure to ask: “Who are the ten smartest people in your industry or market, and what kinds of relationships do you have with those people?”
Transcript:
Two early steps that are relatively straightforward to engage on: one is to take your top five business partners and really ask yourself, as an enterprise, whether you have created a relationship with those business partners where both of you are learning as fast as possible, through collaboration with each other. I think most of us would find, in large companies in particular, that the business partners we have, we have transactional relationships. Buy, sell, and we both end up hopefully better off — but we’re not really learning from each other. I think the real opportunity is to take a hard look at each of those relationships and say, “How could we organize this relationship to learn better from each other, faster from each other?”
Another baby step is to ask the question which I find interesting to pose to executives, which is “Who are the ten smartest people in your industry or market, and what kinds of relationships do you have with those people? Do you have any relationships with those people? First of all, can you name them,” because that’s often a challenge in itself. Second, “do you have relationships with them,” and then thirdly, “in those relationships, to the extent you have them, are you in fact learning from each other? Have you created a basis, for a sustained relationship that benefits both parties in terms of learning and performance improvement?”
