The author Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a most interesting book about the Lincoln presidency: ‘Team of Rivals’. It says it all.
John Kerry teamed up with John McCain for years to fix problems. Before that, Kerry the anti war and pacifist, and McCain, war veteran, prisoner of war, did not speak to each other for 10 years.
Spain’s 1978 constitution, post Franco, was literally written and signed at once by great minds from the ex-Franco system, the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, Communist party and nationalists parties. They were genuinely at war with each other well before, for years.
South Africa, came up from apartheid with the two opposite poles teaming up. Mandela offered government places to people who had ‘managed’ his prison.
The Good Friday agreement in Ireland managed to get together irreconcilable positions, historical, political and religious.
If all this can happen in the real big world, it can happen to you and me in our real small worlds. You and I work in or with corporations. We have rivals with small ‘r’. OK, sometimes the font is big. It looks like a big ‘R’. But usually we are not asked to write constitutions with people who wanted to kill us.
This is a five point winning strategy:
List your rivals
Invite them to team up
Watch their faces of surprise
Insist
Surprise everybody
You are in the path of success big time.
Try it. Probably it has never been done around you.
(I thought you wanted innovation)