Collaboration Ted Talk Howard Rheingold

While watching this talk I realized that it really takes a group effort to make great strides in the world. In both the world we live in and in the world of the past. The speaker talked about how everything is a competition but to make great improvement the people's differences have to be put aside to get anywhere. I am a very competitive person and this talk reenforces the fact that despite being competitive I have to put aside differences with people to make sure I am giving the team a good chance to gain as a whole. The speaker's technique in built around backing up his ideas with examples of how collaboration make things easier for everyone. He talks about how sometimes a company will not put restrictive pattents on products or ideas so that everyone can benifit. This in turn helps the company that originally came up with the products or idea because they get to see what everyone else does with it so then they can improve on the other companies' improvements. The presentaion was pretty stiff in this paticular talk. The guy was standing there talking while he was clicking through slides with a remote so there was the air more of a business meeting than something he was trying to get people to believe in. Normally when someone is talking about something they really care about they have some passion behind their voice. I know that if I was trying to sell an idea that was very important to me I would let it show a little so people would be more engaged. I really didn't get that feeling while watching this talk because it was so businesslike and plain. The presentation, however had little effect on the importance of the subject because working together is very important. I can connect to this because in sports even though when it seems like some people aren't doing anything to benefit the team there will always be a time when they make the contributions and you don't. The overarching theme for this talk was that it takes everybody to make the world a good place and without collaboration there wouldn't be nearly as many good things in the world as there are today.