A sign of the growing popularity of all kinds of collaboration is the growing number of books on some aspect of the topic.  What are your favorites? Here are some I’ve come across:

Alone Together: Sociable Robots, Digitized Friends, and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude by Sherry Turkle.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop.

Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten T. Hansen.

Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Model by Robert Axelrod.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.

Consensus Through Conversation: How to Achieve High-Commitment Decisions by Larry Dressler.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: The International Association of Facilitators Handbook by Sandy Schuman.

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball.

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.

The Culture of Collaboration by Evan Rosen.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson.

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee.

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations by Robert L. Cross.

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide by Cass R. Sunstein.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li.

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer.

Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature by Mark Earls.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.

Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization by J. Lipman-Blumen and J. & H. Leavitt.

How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions by David Strauss and Thomas C. Layton.

How to Make Meetings Work by Michael Doyle and David Strauss.

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein.

Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances by J. Richard Hackman.

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World by Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling.

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni.

Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia and Frances Anderson.

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion by Rich Ling.

The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule by Donald W. Pfaff and Edward O. Wilson.

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan.

Organizing Genius – The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators by Patrick Lencioni.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison.

The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player: Becoming the Kind of Person Every Team Wants by John C. Maxwell.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold.

Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin.

Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J Wheatley.

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam L. Penenberg.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler.

Why Teams Don’t Work by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith.

X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.

It is the moment when people see your best side.

That’s most likely to happen when you really click with a person or situation. Conversely a bad reaction can quickly spiral down into conflict, even enmity.

What’s the most likely way for someone to see you at your best? It is when you bring out their top talent and temperament. That’s when that person is most likely to see and support yours.

That’s when they say, “I like the way I am when I am around you.”  

Jack Nicholson famously said a variation of this effect “You make me want to be a better man.”

The result?  Together you become happier and higher-performing. Then you are able to accomplish something greater than you could alone. This life-affirming concept is buttressed by research and, for me, observing and interviewing hundreds of people as a journalist. It’s my motivation for writing this blog.

In addition to the examples you find here, to accomplish more and savor your life – with others, see the Brafman’s five ways to choose to connect well with others in their new book, Click.

Unconditional love is a swell idea yet admit it.  Aren’t there times you’d like to change other’s behavior? Get them to act right, like you.  Or perhaps you’d like to drop a bad habit.  Then learn how to “nudge.”

That’s a situational prompt that sways people to change.

For example, the traditional approach to getting drivers to reduce speed are those portable signs stationed at the side fo the street, showing how fast you are driving.  This is a shame or fear-based method. Instead, evoke pride or humor – or make it easier to do the right thing. In places in the UK, those signs don’t just tell drivers their speed. They smile at cars under the limit, and frown at cars over the limit.

Make the Right Option More Pleasurable Than the Other One

To encourage people to get exercise by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, one inventive group made the stairs sunnier and another made it more fun (piano stairs experiment) to walk than stand on the elevator.

Appeal to Our Better Nature

To motivate more people to wash their hands in the restroom two signs were

 added, one for women and a more blunt one for men.

Instead of telling motorists to stop acting bad with “Don’t Litter” signs the state of Texas had much greater success by appealing to Texans’ pride, with signage saying “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Make it Easier to Do the Right Thing

If you worked for an organization that offered automatic payroll deduction for savings you’d be much more likely to save if the system was one where you had to opt-out than how they usually are set up – you must opt in to save.  So discovered the authors of Nudge.

What nudge will you try to improve behavior – yours or others?

I started this blog soon after The Age of Engagement morphed into a flood of 

ideas on how “we” can accomplish more together. Here are the books I’ve mentioned and authors I have interviewed. Crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe), Here Comes Everybody Clay  Shirky), groundswell (Charlene

 Li), Emergence (Steven Johnson), Six Degrees (Duncan Watts), Herd (Mark Earls) Pull (Pamela Walker Laird), Wikinomics (Don Tapscott), Culture of Collaboration (Evan Rosen),  Kindness in a Cruel World (Nigel Barber),  Cultural Creatives (Sherry Anderson and Paul Ray), The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki), Connected  (Daniel Altman), Convergence Culture (Henry Jenkins), The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), Consensus Conversation Larry Dressler), Infotopia (Cass Sunstein), A Whole New Mind (Dan Pink), The Starfish and the Spider (Ori Brafman), Spiritual Partner Support Groups (Susan Page), Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely), Turning to One Another (Margaret Wheatley), Nexus (Mark Buchanan), Linked (Albert Laszlo Barabasi), A Rulebook for Arguments (Anthony Weston), The Neuroscience of Fair Play (Donald Pfaff), On Being Certain (Robert Burton),  The Argument Culture (Deborah Tannen), Who’s Driving the Purpose-Driven Church? (Rick Warren),  Be the Media (Peter Broderick), The Future of Reputation (Daniel Solove),  Smart Mobs (Howard Rheingold), The Way We’ll Be (John Zogby), Walk Your Talk (Kare Anderson), Multiplicity (Rita Carter), Tribes (Seth Godin), Authentic Happiness (Martin Seligman),  The Back of the Napkin (Dan Roam), My Startup Life (Ben Casnocha), New Tech, New Ties (Rich Ling), Get Slightly Famous (Steven Van Yoder),  Johnny Bunko (Dan Pink), Send (David Shipley and Will Schwalbe), Personality not included (Rohit Bhargava), Innovation Killer (Cynthia Rabe), Sway (Ori and Rom Brafman), Who’s Your City? (Richard Florida), Me to We (Marc and Craig Kielburger), The Brain That Changes Itself (Norman Doidge), Now Discover Your Strengths (Marcus Buckingham), Why Good Things Happen to Good People (Stephen Post, Jill Neimark and Otis Moss), Compassion in Action (Ram Dass), The No Asshole Rule (Bob Sutton), Nudge (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein), The Spiral Staircase (Karen Armstrong), The Lucifer Effect (Phil Zimbardo), Freakonomics (Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt), The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), Life’s Golden Ticket (Brendon Burchard) and Team of Rivals (Doris Kearns Goodwin).

More than your solitary smarts, your capacity to do something extraordinary depends on something else. It is your ability to build on the work of others from the past or with others at the same time. So said Malcolm Gladwell at last year’s New Yorker conference. This may be a key theme in Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t“, his next book, due out this November.

Here’s some of Gladwell’s related insights:

• To gain mastery of a topic typically takes 10,000 hours. Yet, breakthroughs are more likely to happen on the path to mastery when one collaborates with others who are dedicated to the same goal.

• Achieving a high score on an I.Q. test or demonstrating the ability to work hard, alone, for along time are not good indicators of our capacity to accomplish the remarkable today. Rather, it is our capacity to focus on a single topic with others, then synthesize the resulting research and ideas to create something singularly new and better.

• Thus your ability to find the best collaborators is key. This holds true, not only in hiring, picking a work team or selecting members for your volunteer committee – but in whom you marry or befriend. To make smarter choices, sidestep the mismatch problem. (As Gladwell has been writing and speaking about this tendancy it may be in the book). He writes that the mismatch happens when, “the criteria we use to prepare to assess someone’s ability to do a job, is radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself.”

So what’s an outlier? Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it, “an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations.”

A black swan is an outlier, for example. Taleb writes, “Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are.

Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.”

Garry Peterson believes that, “black swans occur when there are significant mismatches between the models people use to understand the world and the subsequent expectations that those models produce and observations. In other words, black swans are model errors.”

Tip from the remarkable Taleb: Learn to expect the unexpected.
In fact, he “believes we create stories to convince ourselves that the future is predictable.” Curb the tendancy to quickly categorize.

Differing from Gladwell, in part, Taleb doubts that we can predict who will change the world. Also, Taleb vigorously disagrees with Gladwell’s coverage of his ideas, writing,” while flattering, (Gladwell) puts me in the wrong box –too much emphasis on … applications of my ideas to finance/economics, & less on the dynamics of historical events/philosophy of history, artistic success, technological luck, and general uncertainty in society.” Taleb’s not alone in challenging Gladwell’s leaps of thinking.

Like the growing slew of books on happiness signals a yearning in our culture today so, too, the popularity of story-filled guides to making smarter decisions seems to reflect another prevalent doubt in our increasing transient, complex world. See if you find Outliers to be a helpful follow-up to Sway and Nudge.

When we first fall for someone, we become enamored with everything about that person. We gush. We create things to commemorate their specialness. We feel so connected, we fill in the blanks about what we don’t know. We assume we will like the rest of that person just as much. That’s just human.

If we then fall in love, then that early, rosy view of the adored one’s perfection may last just six months. That’s why Democrats who, (like MIT’s Henry Jenkins and behavioral-economist Dan Ariely) believe there’s a fan-like fervor felt by many Obama supporters, have reason to worry the longer this “bitter” Clinton vs. Obama battle rages on. Then there’s the “familiarity” problem. What sways you?

Here’s five quick lessons we can glean from this Fandom Effect for making wiser choices in our work and our social and personal lives. When you are drawn to someone you’ve just met, remind yourself of these phenomena:

1. People Like People Who Seem Like Them
Two suggestions:

• Define Yourself Before Others Do.
Years ago, I recall a radio commentator saying, “Presidential candidate George W. Bush will be active in making pronouncements in the coming weeks. He wants to define himself before his opponents do it for him.” (Don’t we all.)

You can bring out the best side in others as you attract them to you, starting with how you define yourself for them. Here’s how. Demonstrate the part of you that is most like the person you are around. Then you will feel positively familiar to that person and he will project onto you the qualities he likes in himself and thus be more likely to like you.

• You’ll Prove Yourself Right…at First
Conversely, the more you like someone you’ve just seen or met, the more you’ll magnify in your mind the qualities you like. Plus you’ll blind to those qualities that are discordant with yours. Men, tend “to trust people who’re part of a group with them” while women are “more likely to trust strangers who share some personal connection, such as a friend of a friend.”

2. Recognize the “Confirmation Bias”: Ah, He Acts Right – Like Me
To confirm your initial perception, you will seek and find in what that person says and does, the reinforcing evidence that the person feels and thinks like you.

3. Deepen Which the Ruts in the Roads of Your Brain Maps?
The more actions you take on behalf of that initial positive view, the more deeply you will believe and defend that view. Whatever you most remember, repeat and practice become your strongest beliefs and habits. Because of the brain’s extreme plasticity, we now know we’re capable of remarkable changes in belief, health and behavior – at any age.

Recognize, by the way, that the opposite effect – reaction against someone – is a stronger, felt emotion. That is, if you instinctively dislike someone you just saw or met you will react sooner and more intensely against that person than if the first feeling was positive. Plus you’ll also look for confirming evidence. It is more difficult to change from a negative to a positive feeling than vice versa.

4. Don’t’ Be Stopped by the Feet of Clay Effect
The more actions you have taken in support of that wonderful person, the more upset or even betrayed you feel when that inevitable point comes – when that special person doesn’t act “right” like you. He exhibits either a conflicting opinion or way of behaving. Your hero has feet of clay, as do you.

5. Find the Sweet Spot From Which to Build a Mutually-Beneficial Relationship

That is the relationship’s first turning point. Now that you can see more of the whole person, you tend to flip, focusing more on what you don’t like than what you do. It is the brain’s naturally protective mechanism.

You usually have two choices.
• You can continue to focus on what you don’t like in the person, finding confirming evidence, and spiral down into more reaction and conflict until your views harden and the relationship dissolves.

• Or you can look at the size of the sweet spot of mutual interests – where kindred feelings and values coincide.

Is that sweet spot sizable enough to cultivate, and continue? Then speak candidly to that area of mutual benefit, in your conversations with that formerly special person. Does that other person see that sweet spot as you do?

Then there’s hope. Your shared time together is not for naught. You both recognize that you’ve built the foundation for growing the relationship. Your differences in temperament and talents can serve you both. Bonus benefit? Just ten minutes of positive interaction with another person can improve your memory and mental acuity.

Both of you can experience the upside of being unlikely friends rather than the downside of mismatched, former friends, lovers or partners. Next step? Pledge to keep a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions (or better) with each other. If this ratio is an accurate predictor of happy marriages then it’s probably a reliable indicator for other kinds of healthy relationships. Bonus? You’ll become more resilient.

• Life Favors the Optimistic So Learn to Be More So

Since it appears we are each born with an emotional set point, along the range between being deeply pessimistic to invariably optimistic, it pays to know where you are on that continuum. If you tend to be negative, for example, you are probably hard on yourself and chided by others about being downbeat.

For you, the relationship-building, life-affirming, success-attracting approach odescribed above is especially arduous. But you can make it easier, research shows. Here are three tools that have helped me:

1. Discover your set point and then practice ways to be more resilient and upbeat by reading Marty Seligman’s Learned Optimism and taking the test. (Hint: pessimistic people see a present problem as pervasive, personal and permanent).

2. Then gain clarity about your strongest talents and most attractive temperament so you can recognize the kind of work activities at which you excel and the people with complementary talents and temperament – so you and the people close to you can become happier and higher-performing. To discover your strengths, read Marcus Buckingham’s Now Discover Your Strengths and take the related test.

3. To put the insights from the above two books to work in forging positive, productive relationships with others, learn the approach taught in my ebook, LikeAbility. Contact me if you’d like a copy of this $15 ebook.

The unpopularity of top-down management is old news by now. Yet how, exactly, does one create an openly collaborative organization? One that’s based on the power of peer relationships? One that can thrive?

The best Peer2Peer groups are efficient, adaptive and resilient resource-maximizers. That’s why they include “good” and “bad” groups. They are exceedingly good at outmaneuvering their opposition in this flattening world. They include Toyota, Wikipedia, AA, craigslist, Skype – and al Queda.

Yet “flattened” leadership is not a modern notion, notes Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom who believe it enabled the Apaches to evade a much larger Spanish army for 200 years. In their book, The Starfish and the Spider they offer six signs of a starfish, a decentralized group:

1. When attacked, it is more likely to become even more open and decentralized.
2. One can mistake a starfish for a spider.
3. A ‘starfish-style” open system doesn’t have central intelligence, rather intelligence spreads throughout the system.
4. Open systems can easily mutate.
5. A decentralized organization sneaks up on you.
6. As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.

To confirm that an organization is a starfish, observe:

1. Is there a person in charge?
2. Are there headquarters?
3. If you thump it on the head, will it die?
4. Is there a clear division of roles?
5. If you take out a unit, is the organization harmed?
6. Is power and knowledge concentrated or distributed?
7. Is the organization flexible or rigid?
8. Can you count the number of employees or participants?
9. Are working groups funded by the organization, or are they self-funding?
10. Do working groups in it communicate directly or through higher-ups?

In the authors’ rather ghoulish metaphor, starfish (representing headless, decentralized groups) can survive when legs are ripped off while spiders can’t. As H. Soza notes, “Many of our problems today are the result of leaders who try to defeat “starfish” entities using “spider” techniques (e.g. shock and awe, surges, lawsuits, hostile takeovers, etc.) We waste energy, treasure and lives because we have been too lazy to truly understand what we are fighting, or the actual opportunity that stands before us.” Some think the book over-simplifies.

While many of the authors’ examples involve large groups, the same principles hold true for any start-up, cell group centered or one-time project team. “We” can succeed when recruited or by recruiting individuals with much less money or contacts today. Yet we need the right mix of talents, an agreed-upon goal and rules of engagement – and a capacity to work with extremely diverse people, it seems.

In this podcast Brafman describes how you can succeed with a starfish group.