The sum of us can be more powerful (and fun) than one of us… sometimes. The confounding thing is exactly how we make it happen.

Even when we have a strong desire to collaborate, we are  likely bump up against into each other because, as in love,  good intentions don’t always lead to mutually satisfying behavior. Yet, as in love and friendship, the togetherness of collaboration is where our most meaningful moments in life often happen. We have the opportunity to either step away or stay steadfast in creating something greater than we can alone. Sometimes we can even savor the bumpy moments along the way. What’s your favorite quote for collaborating? Here’s some ideas.

“Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.” ~ Margaret Wheatley

“Maybe we are not here to see each other but to see each other through” ~ anonymous

“We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.” ~ Clay Shirky

“If you want to have great partnerships, be a great partner. Get beyond yourself. Give up the notion that you are well-rounded, and stop expecting your colleagues to be universally proficient. Incorporate someone else’s motivations into your view of the accomplishment. Loosen up.

Put aside your competitive nature, your prepackaged view of how the thing should be done, and your desire not to be inconvenienced with the imperfections of a fellow human being. Focus more on what you do for the partnership than what you get from it. Demonstrate trust and see if they don’t surprise you with their trustworthiness. Be slower to anger and quicker to forgive. And along the way, communicate continuously.” ~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.” ~ David Bollier

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

“We live in two worlds – order and chaos.  In the world of order, we plan, reflect, and think about what to do next.  In the world of chaos, things happen, we get things done, yet unpredictability persists.   In one world, we like to think we are in control.  In the other, we mingle together with increasing complexity, conflict, and uncertainty.” ~ David Spangler

“How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.” ~ Robert Sapolsky

“I am continually impressed by the inconsistency of sustained attention in relationships.  Partners complain about this all the time, and kids probably would too if they could. ‘We’ have evolved with the capacity to attend to each other, but it’s not exactly dominant in our lives. Imagine a world where it was!” ~ Thomas Bradbury

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” ~ Henry Winkler

“If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.” ~ Lyndon Johnson

“A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect, the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.” ~ E.M. Forrester

“Daily life is foreplay for relationships.” ~ Kate Feldman

“Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel “you are welcome here and that you came to the right place.” ~ Peter Block

“Safety is a basic human need.  People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals generates great ideas.”  ~ John Sweeney

“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.” ~ Max Lucade

“Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that,” she said. “But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control.” ~ Sherry Turkel

“Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration. Working across organizational values can create tremendous value or destroy it – the hoarding and squabbling endemic in large companies can actually make collaboration more expensive than not attempting it.” ~ Morten T. Hansen

“Human beings are wired to care and give and it’s probably our best route to happiness.” ~ Dacher Keltner

“Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”. If we cannot say “no” then our “yes” has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations, without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving. No is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.” ~ Peter Block

“Groups need both carrot and stick-based rules to remain stable.” ~ Robert Axelrod

“We need to look at front porches as crime fighting tools, treat picnics as public health efforts and see choral groups as occasions of democracy. We will become a better place when assessing social capital impact becomes a standard part of decision-making.” ~ Lew Feldstein

“Consequential strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest – our family and close friends – often put us into. Through interacting with people who do not know us as well, we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, ‘But that’s not like you!’” ~ Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman

“Collaboration is more about find that sweet spot of mutual interest and understanding and being understood, than it is about speak well.” ~ Kare Anderson

“From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media – where old and new media converge by involving fans – is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator – or the brands that back them.” ~ Henry Jenkins

“In the long history of humankind…those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” ~ Charles Darwin

“Effective collaboration is about maximizing time, talent and tools to create value. The old way was the pass-along approach. I do my job and then pass along my work product to you. You do your piece of it and pass it along to somebody else.” ~ Evan Rosen

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”  ~ Carl Jung

“Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.” ~ Scott E. Page

“Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully – and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.” ~ Patrick Lencioni

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.” ~ Miles Davis

“Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other’s prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.” ~ Cass Sunstein

“Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.” ~ Mike Rutherford

“Some of the power has shifted from companies to people. Using social media tools (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) more individuals are creating semi-spontaneous ‘groundswells’ of opinions to which companies and other institutions are realizing they must respond.  From marketing to consumers organizations are being pulled into engaging with individuals.” ~ Charlene Li

“No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.” ~ Marcus Buckingham

“Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn’t conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn’t decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.” ~ Steven Johnson

“Trust is the glue that holds relationships together.” ~ Price Pritchett

“In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person’s contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that’s more responsive to the changing environment. “ ~ Keith Sawyer

“Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us). It is our innate nature as “herd” animals that cause mass movements, not the influence of a handful of influential individuals.” ~ Mark Earls

“Be more interested than interesting.” ~ Mark Goulston

“Hot groups have members who are task-obsessed and full of passion. They share a style which is “intense, sharply focused, and full bore. Members feel engaged in an important, even vital and personally ennobling mission; their task dominates all other considerations; and although such intense teams tend to remain intact only for a relatively short period of time, that time is remembered nostalgically and in considerable detail by its members.” ~ J. Lipman-Blumen and H. Leavitt

“For productive collaboration adopt five principles: involve the relevant stakeholders, build consensus phase by phase, design a process map, designate a process facilitator and harness the power of group memory.” ~ David Straus and Thomas C. Layton

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ~ Plato

“Trafficking organizations these days take the form of decentralized networks that shift continuously, assuming new configurations as opportunities present themselves and then morphing again to meet the needs of the next moment. They don’t specialize in a single commodity like cocaine. Instead, they move whatever goods present an opportunity for profit in the present moment; drugs today, arms tomorrow, people the next day and then knock-off designer handbags after that. Yet government agencies’ understanding of the organizational structure of international trafficking networks is dangerously out of date. They go after the illicit trades as if they had a hierarchical structure with information and power flowing up and down a chain of command.” ~ Moises Naim

“If your friend’s friend’s friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too.” ~ James H. Fowler

“Hackman’s paradox: Groups have natural advantages: they have more resources than individuals; greater diversity of resources; more flexibility in deploying the resources; many opportunities for collective learning; and, the potential for synergy. Yet studies show that their actual performance often is subpar relative to “nominal” groups (i.e. individuals given the same task but their results are pooled.) The two most common reasons: groups are assigned work that is better done by individuals or are structured in ways that cap their full potential.” ~ Richard Hackman

“The best advice for parents is not to shelter their children from the suffering in the world, and to engage them in doing something to get involved.” ~ Marc Keilburger

“Some of us cry when we watch sad movies or wince when we see athletes fall. This sense of shared experience is at the core of human experience. Because our brain has mirror neurons, we are capable of interpreting facial expressions of pain or joy, the first step towards feeling empathy, which causes an instinctively imitative response – the chameleon effect. That ‘mirroring’ response enables two people to literally see they are more alike in that moment.  That similarity evokes familiarity and thus a feeling of comfort that can lead to mutual trust with others.  When these mirror neurons do not work an individual may not be aware of another’s feelings and thus act in socially incorrect ways.” ~ Marco Iacoboni

“All for one, one for all.” ~ Alexander Dumas

“There are three stages of organizational development in this networked era. 1. Fortress – an organization where there are insiders and outsiders, and the two rarely meet or interact; 2. Transactional – an organization that is engaged with their community, but with the sole focus of transactions, such as getting people to sign up for an event or make a donation; and 3. Transparent – an organization that fully engages and empowers their community to accomplished shared goals.” ~ Beth Kanter and Allison Fine

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“The world you inhabit is the world you make. Your reputation precedes you, biasing the way new colleagues deal with you. Your first moves, friendly or hostile, tip the balance for future interactions. When you exhibit trust, you will most often find trustworthiness. When you are selfish, you will most often find selfishness. When you compete, others must resort to competition. If you choose to play the game strictly for your own advantage, your attempts at collaboration will indeed be, (as Thomas Hobbes said), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’” ~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“Let all humanity be your sect.” ~ Sikh saying

Here’s to living a greater life and accomplishing greater things together than we can on our own:

“It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own. “  ~ Joyce Carol Oates

 “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung

“We judge others by their acts, but ourselves by our intentions.” ~ American proverb

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction then both are changed.” ~ Carl Jung

“Mutual understanding and the human touch are in inverse relationship to frequency of encounter and kinship.” ~ Yi Tuan

“A true leader is not one you look up to because they are the best. A true leader is one that draws the best out in you.” ~ Anne Warfield

“A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” ~ Henrik Warfield

“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”  ~ anonymous

“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ~ Samuel Johnson

“You can’t stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh.” ~ Jay Leno

“In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.” ~ Blaise Pascal

“In the religion of love to pray is to pass, by a single word, into the inner chamber of the other.” ~ Galway Kinnell

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.” ~ Victor Hugo 

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Arthur Baldwin

“Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion.” ~ Dwight Macdonald

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne “All value resides in individuals. Value is distributed in individual space. Relalationship economic is the framework for wealth creation.  Deep support is the new metaproduct. ~ Shshanna Zuboff 

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” ~ Victor Hugo

“We didn’t come over on the same ship, but were all in the same boat.” ~ Bernard M. Baruch

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong.” ~ Sydney J. Harris

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…” ~ Tom Paine

“Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” ~ Chief Seattle

“Many candles can be kindled from one candle without diminishing it.” ~ The Midrash

Yes, relationships seem dangerous or at least irritating at times.  And our choices often appear murky. Want a surprisingly quick and satisfying exercise for making wiser decisions next time? Try it by opening to any page in the witty new book by Dr. Mardy Grothe, I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like.  (Relationship Is Like a Shark is one of his chapter titles.) His previous gems are Never Let a Fool Kiss You or Let a Kiss Fool You, Oxymoronica and Viva la Repartee.

Like to bring more joy to your marriage? Want to increase your income by training others to lead groups, based on your expertise? Learn how  from someone who’s successful at both.

In this interview hear how Susan Page is training therapists and marriage educators to lead “Spiritual Partnership Support Groups”  - an approach she advocates in her newest book, Why Talking is Not Enough: Eight Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage. To attract more trainers she spoke at the Smart Marriages conference. (Hint: as an author, you get more invitations to speak where you’ll meet more of your ideal customers.)

People who wish to lead the groups can get an extensive training manual. In leading the groups (or coaching), they becomes more informed, loyal fans of Susan and her book.  What a profitable, life-affirming way to work with others, eh? Page is a natural at partnering with groups to build a constituency for her books in ways that enable the groups to better serve its members. 

For example, to spur sales of her first book, If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single, this former minister launched her own book tour. She collaborated with churches around the U.S. to offer an evening seminar for their singles, packaging the book as part of the offering.  Participating churches gained a fresh way to attract new members and serve current ones.  Page created what all authors desire – a channel for quantity sales of her book while building a loyal community of readers for her subsequent titles.

Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren attracts mega book sales and a large, active constituency with a cellular and a B2B approach (business to business), providing his peer pastors with sample sermons and church programs. Page, too, recognized the power of B2B . With her books “relationship expert” Page “sells” to the church staff, providing a benefit they can offer two niche “end users” – congregants who are singles and couples.

Each time you offer your constituency fresh value through partnerships you spiral up in ability to attract more credible partners.  That’s why Bono approached Warren, for example, to join the “ONE campaign” to end poverty. And Warren’s church is hosting a rare program in which he’ll interview both presidential candidates. 

You, too, could reach out to the club, civic group or other member-based organization that serves your kind of readers and/or clients. With each new value-building partnership it becomes easier for you to recruit other organizations to cross-refer, co-create or otherwise collaborate on services, events and products that benefit all partners – and the people served by them.

As Page did, you can start with a first constituency-building partnership. For example, I introduced a store designer to a ghostwriter who’s writing a book for him on how to create the storefront that pulls more people in off the streets. When the book comes out at the end of 2009, he is partnering with local chambers of commerce and business journals to present a seminar to members and readers in their communities. 

To promote these seminars-as-book events, the store designer will provide his local partners with customizable promotional templates for print and online invitations. The partners cover his travel costs and profit from the seminar fees they charge.

And they buy the books in bulk from the publisher. You could adapt this approach to your kind of expertise to increase your credibility and in your profession or industry, perhaps becoming the favorite subject matter expert to your key media. Contact me if you’d like an ebook on SmartPartnering.

Start now to grow your constituency. In this interview hear Susan’s proven relationship-building insights for your life and your work. As Fred Small said, “”Susan Page is like the Buddha channeled by Ann Landers!” .

Here’s wise advice for us all – from Lee and Sachi, inspired by their constant, in-house muse.

Mmm. How will you be describing yourself say five years from now? Or at least one part of you. From the Greek word “opiso” meaning “hereafter” April Groves crafted the word “opi”: Picture the future you, “written in the present tense.”

This seems to me to be a powerful way to visualize an end goal for my life by writing it as if it is true now. That description can be my daily touchstone.

April’s Opi: “After many wildly successful years in real estate, I have left my brokerage to my partner… It was the only way to accommodate the bookings for the next book tour and speaking schedule. Not to mention the trip my husband and I have planned with the children to Europe.”

April tapped Robyn McMaster for her Opi: “Today, I’m checking in to discuss new ideas with scholars currently retreating at the MITA International Brain Based Center, now headquartered in a three story building adjacent to the Lodge at Woodcliffe. Dr. Ellen Weber and I are working with 35 international brain based scholars, currently completing Executive MITA Brain Based Certification.”

Robyn tapped me to offer my Opi. Spontaneously written, here’s “Future Me“:

I am facilitating collaboration-centered (rather than design) charrettes around the world to hone “Me2We” methods with other’s insights (perhaps you) – ways two or more people can accomplish more together than they can on their own. Our Moving From Me To We blog + podcast is now a crowdsourced global community that, among other tools, creates tagged video vignettes of success stories. With the input of Paul Hawken’s Wiser Earth team we’ve created the third evolution of the online social network where people are sharing and collaborating and voting on favorite on Me2We methods. Out annual and local gatherings are a great way for people to finally meet face-to-face.

One of my favorite outcomes are the growth of partnerships between extremely unlikely allies. Our alliances with other communities such as Renaissance Weekend, The Ted Conference seems to have speed such diverse alliances. We’ve interviewed many of you and many of you have interviewed each other and wound up collaborating. What a joy it’s been to watch. Robyn’s been a real inspiration along the way.

Perhaps our sharing our Opis and encouraging others to write them will evoke entrainment to bolster our way to making the next chapters of our lives the memorable adventure stories we seek.

In the spirit of Me2We, I’m tagging

• Ken Thompson, Swarmteams

• Diane Danielson, Downtown Womens Club

• Aaron Strout, Mzinga

• Ori Brafman, The Starfish and the Spider and Sway

• David Sibbet of The Grove

• Aliza Freud, shespeaks

“Visualization and belief in a pattern of reality activates the creative power of realization.” – A. L. Lindall

“We lift ourselves by our thought. We climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere.” – Orison Swett Marden

Driving along the Marin Headlands today, I switched radio channels away from the unfolding news of the stock market “panic.” Within minutes I had to pull to the side of the road. Listening to a recording of Barack Obama’s sermon yesterday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, it was these lines that choked me up:

“In the struggle for peace and justice,
we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for opportunity and equality,
we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world,
we cannot walk alone.”

Later I discovered that rhetoric expert, Jay Heinrichs also felt Obama that was “channeling Martin Luther King.” More specifically for those of you who give speeches, Obama (and his speech writer, Jon Favreau) make adept use of the symploce. That’s a figure of speech where one repeats the beginning and the ending of sequential sentences.

Here’s another example, written by Bill Long:
“When you were a baby, I fed you, because you were my child;/ when you were a youth, I nurtured you, because you were my child;/ when you grew into adulthood, I never ceased my care, because you were my child.”

When people feel especially connected their vital signs are more alike. Heart beat. Skin temperature. Eye pupil dilation. I believe that rhythmic use of language such as the use of symploce (and other kinds of repetition) can literally move an audience to get in sync with a speaker. Such devices of speech may, in fact, create the emotional tipping point to move people from beginning to like or admire a speaker to feeling “at one” with “our” leader. To reach that point, the speaker’s probably in the zone – with us.

What creates that initial likeability? In comparing Obama to President Kennedy, Ted Sorenson, Kennedy’s chief speechwriter, suggests three traits that are vital in this ever more visually-oriented world, “Both Kennedy and Obama …
1. Have fantastically winning smiles
2. … Are very relaxed in front of an audience and on television
3. They don’t shout into a microphone, they talk.

Not all former speech writers are won over by Obama. James C. Humes, “speechwriter to five presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush…” takes harsh, colorful swipes at several candidates, including these:

• Obama is “more style than substance.”

• Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, reminds Humes of Mark Twain’s wife. “She scolded Mark about his cussing. And Mark said to his wife, ‘You got the right words but the wrong music.’ That’s Hillary. Her speaking skills are like painting by the numbers.”

• Mike Huckabee … “just doesn’t look presidential… his name suggests one-half hick and the other half huckster.”

Humes doesn’t let up on his own profession, noting that “presidential speechwriters were called “braintrusters” in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. “But we aren’t braintrusters. We are beauticians.”

Bet there’s going to be considerable more beauty, humor (and ugliness) ahead before we vote. Not only are the stakes high for our country and the world, the campaigns will continue to provide expensive lessons on how to communicate to connect – or not.

Don’t let this happen to you. Use a powerful audience involving technique. Make your presentation about “us” rather than you by evoking The Power of Three. Here’s how. Repeat your key “message” phrase three times in succession, then repeat it once, several more times throughout your talk. First time, it is heard as your slogan. Then becomes “our” anthem – one that the audience becomes eager to echo after you.

In a concession speech (that managed to sound as upbeat as his victory speech) Barack Obama morphed his modern day version of MLK (“free at last”) and JFK (“we choose to go to the moon”) saying with warm, cool confidence, “Yes, we can.”

What core phrase will you repeat three times in a rhythmic cadence, at least once in your speech so that your energy and their’s rises and joins in one energetic rolling wave? Let them leave the room with “our” phrase indelibly imprinted in their brain, eager to repeat it to others.

Three other thoughts. Watching Obama, you realize that 1. Praising your opponent (or others) is a classy show of self-confidence. (When you throw mud you get dirty). Praise is a reflective spotlight.

2. To connect with an audience, you do not have to move around the stage, waving your arms or even raising your voice… unless that is your authentic way of being.

3. Notice that many great speakers evoke a repetitive, cadence to brought out the best side in the people they addressed. Few speak fast. Most had their own brand of passion, self-deflecting humor and enunciated clearly and varied their pace so the points of emphasis stood out. Most of all, speak to bring out others’ best side. Then see the magic that happens when others want to repeat your words in song.