You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.

You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims. – Harriet Woods

Cooperation is the name of the game.

What does that mean?
This quote sounds like it’s promoting win-win methods over win-lose methods, which I call cooperation. Most of us are familiar with win-lose. War, competitive sports, card games, anything with one victor and everyone else is a loser.

In a win-win situation, everyone comes out ahead. You can stand tall, alongside the others. You can win without having to crush the rest of the field. Interestingly, most group sports reward cooperation (win-win mentality) within a team while simultaneously promoting a win-lose mentality toward the other team.

Why is cooperation important?  
By cooperating, we can become more than just the sum of our parts. As a family, as a community, as a nation and as a world. This is the foundation of a team. Most of us use it in many aspects of our lives. It exists within the family (sibling rivalry aside), work, school, groups of our friends, organizations and so much more.

Can you imagine how life would be if there wasn’t cooperation? How would you build your own car? Build your own house? Feed yourself? Make your own clothes? So, we know that we cooperate in some aspects of our lives. How much better might our lives be if we were to cooperate in even more aspects of life?

Where can I apply this in my life?
Admittedly, the win-win model isn’t well suited to competitive sports. But if you enter a sporting event and are looking only to better yourself, competing only against yourself, who cares if you win, right? At least that’s what I tell myself. 8)

If you manage to succeed in a win-win manner at the negotiating table, you just may avert a win-lose in the form of a war. However, if the negotiating strategy is win-lose, and one side had a significant advantage in combat, should negotiations not go their way, they can always fall back on violence, right?

In business, Apple seems to have found a niche making a win-win business strategy happen. They provide a useful product at a price people are willing to pay. People buy the product and are happy. Apple makes money and is happy (as are the shareholders). Haters have something new to hate, and are happy. Win-win-win! 8)

Think about a grocery store. How well would it work if everything was win-lose instead of win-win? Without cooperation, we’d all have to grow our own food, bake our own bread and bottle our own hooch! I know, some of us do a few of these things already, but for fun, not for survival.

To try to cooperate better, I have tried to take some time at the start of a project in order to define what exactly is the desired outcome. What does everyone want? I have found that often there are differences even within a team.

Getting everyone going after the same goal from the start is important, and avoids conflict later on (not to mention hurt feelings and recriminations). Once you and the other person(s) have the goal mapped out, the rest of the project usually moves forward with significantly less drama.

When it’s not a cooperative venture from the start (something like negotiations), the trick I use is to try to find as much common ground as possible. Then I look at were there are differences. I discuss with the others what the reason is for each point of difference, and ask them to explain their reason for their side.

I have found that the demands are often one possible manifestation of their actual desire. By finding what they really want, you can try to find a way to satisfy that want by some other method. This method has worked much better at work than with my teenager. 🙁

Another method for dealing with a not-initially-cooperative negotiation is to get buy-in from the other side. By that, I mean if you can get them to understand that some of their demands hurt the over-all situation, you can (hopefully) get them to become part of the solution.

Not everything can be resolved in a win-win manner, as some people seem to thrive on standing on people or having victims. I would recommend that you be as kind and as rational as you can and try to get the best outcome you can possibly manage.

Something to remember: The Treaty of Versailles (at the end of The War to End All Wars) directly contributed to the start of World War II. Having surrendered unconditionally, Germany was in no position to negotiate, and the victors had their victim.

The resentment festered in Germany for a generation, but resurfaced later, to everyone’s detriment. Compare that outcome after Germany’s unconditional surrender (at the end of World War II) and the Marshal Plan. Quite a difference from the win-lose of the prior war, wouldn’t you say?

From: Twitter, @QuoteHouse
confirmed at : http://thinkexist.com/quotation/you_can_stand_tall_without_standing_on_someone/208219.html
Photo by lumaxart at www.lumaxart.com/