Warrior-like qualities are essential for the day-to-day battles of protecting you and your family against a wide array of undesirables: from external forces like swindlers, spongers and unscrupulous sales people to internal forces like despair and inertia.

It is also no coincidence that so many leading business people attribute at least some of their success to the principles set out in Sun Tzu‘s The Art of War. The more competitive the industry, the more necessary it becomes to approach business strategy as warfare. Or that has been the thinking in the West, probably since the Industrial Revolution.

But the world is re-discovering cooperative behaviour, most notably by developing a plethora of free technology and by sharing knowledge on the web.

While there is a time and a place for fighting your battles, Warrior behaviour becomes debilitating when one start to see every interaction as potentially hostile or as a competition.

How could this affect the pocket? Because the Warrior tends to think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, he struggles to collaborate and therefore misses out on synergies, such as increased revenue through cross-selling, the sharing of resources and the creation of economies of scale.

Picked up the battle axe one time too many? Then you may find Dr Buffington’s ten tips for honing your collaborative skills useful.

Tags: collaboration, competition, Money personality, warrior

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Personal development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.