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My last article, “Collaboration — Raise the bar” (July 11, 2011) suggested that collaboration is currently all the buzz. Right along with creativity and innovation, everybody’s talking and writing about it. Well, not to be outdone, the Harvard Business Review dedicated their July/August edition to just this with the title “Collaborate — Build a culture of trust and innovation.”

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Collaboration is currently all the buzz. Right along with creativity and innovation, everybody’s talking and writing about it. While it may be a great idea, the challenge and the enormous business opportunity is to learn to actually do it. And do it in a way that it actually a makes a very positive difference to you and your business.

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When I was a kid, not that long ago, people smoked like crazy. There was little talk about possible negative effects of going through a pack or two a day. Then people started confronting the data (friends and relatives passing away due to lung cancer), edging past denial, and accepting that all this chemical residue in your lungs was harmful.

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Regular readers will now know this article’s mantra: Good thinking drives good performance.

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Some months ago I was benchmarking a glass of red wine with a chicken sandwich while reading a newspaper at the wine/sandwich bistro at the Detroit airport. The spot as snug as it is has its tables for two or four quite close together, so it’s all too easy to hear what’s going on at the other tables. To my left was a pair talking plenty loud for me to hear, and even hard to not hear, talking at length about a particular meeting sequence that had occurred over the past few months and by all accounts had not and was not going well. “Such a waste of time,” “Hardly anyone’s prepared,” “Does Bob have any idea what we’re thinking?” and you can imagine the rest.

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Earlier this spring I was fortunate to attend a networking event at Lakeshore Advantage in Zeeland, where I met Rob Stam, who at this meeting announced that he had just completed writing and publishing a book, Almost Our Time — Generation X Takes on America’s Challenges.

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Some years ago Charlotte Roberts (coauthor of 5th Discipline Fieldbook and others) introduced me to a wonderfully mind contorting phrase: “Can we discuss the discussability of the undiscussed?”