Co-optetion- A Lesson Everyone Needs, by Dr Prashant Gupta
3E Story Blogathon Post #23 by Dr Prashant Gupta
For Day 23 of the 3E Story Blogathon, Dr Prashant talks about the importance of cooptetion and tells a short story to prove his point. (Do let us know if he was able to prove it successfully)
Cooptetion-A necessity today
A new term was added in management jargon years back-cooptetion, which is a combination of cooperation and competition. In the social media age we live in, we often have overlaps of skills with people around us, and how we collaborate with such people is going to be a critical skill in our success. For example, a life coach may be a competitor to a psychiatrist as people with stress or obsessive compulsive disorder may visit either of them.
From cooptetion to mutual admiration
Let me share a childhood story. Dr Amit Nagpal (the organiser of the story blogathon) and I were class-fellows in school and academically we were competitors. Yet we would come together to jointly organize cultural activities ranging from school farewells to magic shows to stamps and coins exhibitions. (and sometimes our other classfellows were jealous due to the close cooperation and trust we imposed in each other). We organized social welfare activities too (Our peace and environment exhibition was a huge success in school days).
One day, I was reflecting upon the fact that why were we successful at cooperation in spite of being competitors? In my view, there were four primary reasons:-
1) We defined boundaries of cooperation and competition well.
2) We worked with trust when we collaborated.
3) We had mutual admiration and found each other’s company intellectually stimulating. (At the age of 15, we could discuss Osho :)
4) We acted with maturity and were never really jealous of each other.
Collaboration requires trust and competition requires secrecy and we saw the logic of cooperation very clearly (without getting emotional about the fierce academic competition between us). We used to chat for hours at night and then drop each other half way back home.
From mutual admiration to mutual inspiration
We have been good friends since then and we continue to inspire each other. We both had a strong inclination to evolve and grow in life and still celebrate each other’s company. If I inspire Dr Nagpal for physical fitness (your words may carry weight Dr Nagpal, but your body needs to lose weight), he inspires me to aspire for personal development.
So dear readers we have created a new concept-“Mutual Inspiration Club” and hope it continues, till death do us part.
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