The Four Cs: Competition, Collaboration, Cooperation+ Clusters.

Last Friday when I left my room down west campus village around 8:30, I had no clue about what the session with Josie Rowe would look like.

In fact, she spoke of Competition, Cooperation, and Cooperation. Few minutes after I reached the wits club, the day started on a very good note with teaming. I had a formidable balanced team with three interns and three delegates from the Limpompo Local Economic Development project.

The way my team worked, someone from out could not easily differentiate between ‘witsies’ and ‘limpompo workers’, we formed a team and interacted very closely. That remembered me about team work as presented by Peter Arden.

To get back to my Friday, that was a very busy and informative day. I learnt quite a lot from Josie presentation in the afternoon. Before that, I enjoyed the morning session, the talk on competition. I liked Josie’s approach. She tackled it from very different angles: individual, corporate, state and global viewpoints.

Competition is the ‘current rule of the world’ and when Darwin talked of natural selection, he meant exactly the same. That should be understood not only at the individual level, but at the corporate and state levels as well. Thank you Josie because you brought in Collaboration and Cooperation.

We were all given teams where we pulled together our knowledge and experiences to work on the cases we were assigned, I understood the word complimentarity and synergy, that was great.

After the break, Josie came with the fourth C: clusters. The puzzle was complete. It was tough to swallow when she started, then I felt like bored and drowse. I managed not to sleep and focused on clusters. The last work with my team shed more light with the ‘Soweto tourism’.

My team worked on how historical places like the Victor Piettersen, and Villazi street were turned to generate some clusters in Soweto…

Thank you to the delegates from Limpompo, you inspired me about teaming and diversity, thank you Josie for the 4 Cs, tu as été merveilleuse Josie, très énergétique et amicale.