Us against Them

Circling the Wagons You are Americans. You are Germans. Your companies have been merged. Collaboration is key to your success. Let’s talk about loyalty. It’s a big word, a really big word. Who are you loyal to? To your respective companies? Germans to the German side of company, Americans to …

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Benefit of the Doubt

Definition Benefit of the doubt, what does phrase mean? Doubt is something like this: “I don’t understand why my colleague, Manfred, is doing X. I’m not sure if it is good or bad. My sense, that it is not good. Even more, I don’t know if Manfred’s intentions are good or …

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Personal and Participant

Action. Reaction. Whenever we interact with another person they are interacting with us. This sounds rather obvious. So, let’s go little deeper. When we interact with another person, we do our best to read them, to understand them, so that we know how best to react. Much of our behavior …

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Three-Headed Monster

Often I hear or read about how important it is to have an enemy. Not in the sense of a person or group to go into battle against, but instead in the sense of what is not good, what needs to be battled. When it comes to cross-border collaboration there …

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Attributing Motives

We do it all the time Attributing motives is a dangerous thing. Dangerous for those who do it. You will hurt yourself. Badly. To attribute motives means to assign motives to another person. Motives explain why a person said or did something. You all know that I take words seriously. I …

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