By Nils van Dam
I learned the pleasures and challenges of working together from a very tender age. In Antwerp, where I grew up, my parents were always out and about. So was I. In those days, young children followed their parents around to make and meet friends. Doing things together was just the way things went. Summers were even more about friendship. Year after year, I’d stay with my grandparents in Oude Wetering, in North Holland for two whole months. With about fifty other families, my grandparents lived in an isolated neighborhood, separated from the rest of the village by a canal and the polder. I was a city boy, but nonetheless as much a part of this small rural community as the next person. Here, everybody knew everybody, and we all worked together when the task at hand was more than one man could handle. Every August, youths would gather to harvest the hay and store it in bales, making a huge haystack – the best place ever to build a camp in. And every time our neighbor’s cows broke through the wooden gates and escaped to the surrounding fields, we’d help to get them back in their pasture.
Fast forward a decade or two. As I started working at Unilever right after finishing my Master’s in Commercial Engineering, I recognized that same spirit of collaboration there. Here, too, I felt in my colleagues a desire to be part of society, to contribute to it. My job was to manage Becel, a margarine which provided people with cholesterol issues a healthy solution. I enjoyed long-term collaborations with the Belgian Cardiologic Liga and several cardiology professors in Brussels, Leuven and Antwerp. In September 1986, I organized the first run of the Antwerp 10 miles. It was called Becel 10 miles at that time. We counted 800 participants. A small event, nonetheless involving a lot of orchestration with city officials and the Antwerp police force. I was a big believer in connecting healthy food to a healthy lifestyle. When I moved to a new job, this experiment was stopped. Luckily for Antwerp and its joggers, it was picked up by Golazo and became the huge success we all know today.
Many years later, I had a similar experience in my role as global vice president Family Brands, still at Unilever. Working with the World Food Program, among others, we drew up an ambitious plan to support the funding of school meals for primary schools in developing countries. After some initial successes, we struggled to embed this program in a sustainable business model. When I switched jobs – something that, on average, happens every three to four years in big corporates – the program was stopped. Luckily, it was picked up by the global Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) later on.
History seemed to be repeating itself. I learned that partnering works well to create a bigger impact and that collaboration is fun, but that it depends on personal relationships.
When Dado and I decided to write this book together, it was because we noticed most businesses grow stronger through collaboration or by being part of a larger network. My trip to China in 2019, exposed me, firsthand, to the power of ecosystems. Visiting Alibaba, Tencent, Walmart and several stores in Shanghai and Shenzhen the opportunities for companies to collaborate more became very visible.
When we set off, our book focused on the opportunities offered by different forms of collaboration, to show others the best way to select and grow partnerships and ecosystems. We found out soon enough that we needed to focus much more on the key ingredient for building long-term partnerships, the maker or breaker: trust. Our book started evolving from an insightful technical guide on partnerships to a holistic, more philosophical manifesto on how to create sustainable systems. I became very aware that the pendulum of headcount reduction, automation and dehumanization of business into efficient processes has gone too far. The solution lies in dialing up the human factor again. Paradoxically, the comeback of the heart and soul of businesses will be made possible thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, as AI will take over meaningless jobs and give us back the time to connect with others.
We need to do much more thinking on the human side of doing business, we’ve been neglecting this side in the past decade, almost to the point of forgetting it altogether. It’s been inspiring to discover we can flip the model of collaboration again – making it more connected, patient and empathic.
I’ve learned that in life you want to surround yourself with partners, not winners, and so you have to be one yourself. I would like to thank my partner in life, my wife Peggy, for the support she gave me while I was writing this book. Her casual comments, her care and her empathy have influenced this book more than she realizes. I would also like to thank Dado. His positive energy is contagious and his experience in writing books indispensable in making me not get lost in the process. I would also like to thank my good friends, my family for the good conversations on several occasions and for testing some of my ideas; in many cases being unaware that they were guinea pigs for my ideas. I finally would like to thank all my coaches in my career, they were my bosses, they were my colleagues, they were my teammates and my employees. They were a constant source of ideas and of setting the example. This book is a humble extract of all the wisdom they have passed on.