Think of all those times when you were in trouble and you leaned on a friend. I’m talking about the hundreds of people we meet, and share a bond with. They may not be very close to us, but they still lend a helping hand. These are the people you laugh with at a party, the ones who gossip behind your back and the ones who tease you when you act like a fool. Of course you always return the favor.

You don’t need to have an exceptionally intimate bond with someone, for them to connect with you. We connect with people the second we meet them. We feel their pain and they feel ours. We do not know their history, their hopes and dreams, and still we care. Some call these people acquaintances. But I think they’re wrong, these are your friends.

Then, there are the people you trust with your lives. The one’s who’ve always been there. You know them; the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between. Are these your friends? No. They’re not just your friends; they are so much more than that.

They say, friends are the family we choose for ourselves. The best of our experiences are experiences we shared with a friend. The most vivid of our memories are the memories that are connected to friends. What would we do without them? We love them, we hate them and we can’t live without them.

Friends are what make life worth living. Wouldn’t it be great to have a friend at work too? You can’t hope to make a ‘friend’ if you don’t act like a ‘friend’ yourself. Be it business or pleasure, always remember, friendship comes first. Today is friendships day, so honor your friends, your foes and the world ambassador for friendship, honor, Winnie the Pooh.

There are times when an organization cannot handle its increasing work load. There are a number of ways to handle this situation. You can increase your work force, merge with a larger organization or you can share the workload. Increasing the work force can be a very tedious job. It would involve increasing office space and day to day resources as well. Every merger comes with strings and not everyone likes to be tied down. They say, ‘sharing is caring.’ So let’s look at two ways that enable organizations to share the workload. ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘off shoring’, though the concepts have been around since the 1980’s, it was only after the 2004 U.S Elections that ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘Off shoring’ became terms of everyday usage.

Technically the terms have very different meanings but they are used interchangeably. Outsourcing is subcontracting a process to a third-party company, whereas Off Shoring is subcontracting a process to a third-party company, outside the country. The advantage of doing this is that companies can save on costs. The main contribution to cost effectiveness is the gap in the wages of developed and developing countries. The world today has become a global economy. We are all so interconnected, that the growth in any one economy will have a positive effect on every other economy in the world. On the other hand, the fall of an economy can have disastrous global consequences. Case and point: the current recession.

Call it ‘outsourcing’, ‘off shoring’, ‘near shoring’ or anything else; the fact remains that sharing resources, responsibilities and liabilities, is in everyone’s best interest. The sheer volume of work load being outsourced, is an indicator of the effectiveness of ‘outsourcing’. Be it in business, or in personal relationships, we all function on one basic agreement. ‘You do your part and ill do mine.’

The Coliseum, Pantheon, Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain, Rome was not built in one day and Rome was not built by one man. Landmarks like the Coliseum are a testament to what humans can accomplish when they work together towards a goal. We have come far since the days of the gladiator games. We no longer feed slaves to hungry lions for entertainment. Our modern structures are appropriately awe inspiring. Yet in the course of our progress we seem to have lost the ability to co-operate and collaborate.

What happened to working together? What happened to lending a helping hand just because you could? Today when we look at another organization we immediately think of them as the competition, the opposition. We seem to have forgotten the concept of ‘allies’. Just because someone is engaged in the same or a similar activity as you does not mean that he is your competitor. A smart successful businessman of today would find a way to turn his opposition into an ally. Today, business practices require us to think beyond accounting statements. We are accountable for a lot more than just turning a profit. We must find ways to work with one another so that we all succeed.

Monetary gains are no longer the measure of a man’s success. It is only one of the many factors to be considered.Today the world is more concerned with the legacy of a business. What is the world saying about you? Individually all of us are doomed to be insignificant in the grad tapestry of time. Our legacy is one that will be forgotten, but by working together we can accomplish more than any of us individually could ever even dream of. We can build higher, longer, bigger and stronger. Let’s build our own coliseum, one brick at a time.

A single drop of water is not even enough to quench your thirst, but keep adding drop after drop and you could end up with enough to fill an ocean. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that there is strength in numbers, and that two heads are better than one. This holds true even in business.  This is why business organizations have grown from sole proprietorship’s to the gigantic joint stock companies of today. Not all businesses can become corporate giants.  Does this mean that they cannot achieve the same amount of success nor have the same impact as their much larger peers? Alone it would be near impossible for any small business to compete with corporate entities but by collaborating with other small businesses it could be as easy as a walk in the park.

In todays market every businessman faces keen competition against dozens of other organizations. There are very few takers for the services being provided by many. So instead of acting like a pack of hungry dogs fighting over a scrap of food it makes a lot more sense to pool resources and share revenue.

Instead of spending significant amounts to out shine a competitor the smarter thing to do would be to make that competitor a partner and collaborate on business activities. Instead of trying to beat each other why not join each other? Gone are the days of cutthroat competitiveness. There are new rules to this old game. It is a lot more beneficial for all involved to collaborate and co-operate in business activities. By pooling resources we can increase our strength and attract more clients, and by sharing revenue we ensure steadier and greater gains not to mention we significantly reduce competition.