Welcome to Comradity.
I’m co-founder Katherine Kern. We started COMRADITY to offer a physical creative space to open minds, strategize, create, and execute, collaboratively. From our experience, businesses grow and profit when customers, employees, and partners believe they will mutually benefit from collaborating. We both worked and led companies where collaboration was not transactional, but worked because there was a sense of community and camaraderie. Smush those ideas together and that’s where the name, comradity, came from.
But we also experienced threats to that “comradity” in our business experience. We weren’t alone. We opened about the same time that Peter Turchin published “The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America” in 2013. Turchin relates economic inequality to the decline in “Social Cooperation” introduced in Robert Putnam’s 1995 article, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America.”
“One important factor, closely related to social cooperation, is the degree of economic inequality. Both general theories of social evolution and empirical studies suggest that inequality is corrosive of cooperation.”
In our experience, business cooperation or collaboration and equal economic growth are related. There are many examples of leaders who recognized that when everyone mutually benefits, they work harder to achieve mutual success. Ray Kroc at McDonald’s put partners profits ahead of his own, creating many of today’s largest food service companies, restaurant operators, etc. The leaders of the Apollo program at NASA motivated teams to nail moon landings (which today’s more sophisticated technologies have failed to do) and bring astronauts back alive. My first assignment at Leo Burnett, United Airlines return after a strike, revealed that without strong business relationships, we never would have succeeded in overcoming the many factors outside of a business’s control.
Unfortunately, there are also plenty of examples of leaders who take advantage of those who are willing to give without paying off with mutual benefit. Many of those stories are untold - who’s proud of that! For example, in the start-up world, where the success rate is less than 1%, there are a lot more people who lose than those who win.
That may be one reason why after Covid, in the heart of the VC community in the Northeast, it was very unlikely that anyone would rush to go back to the office. Those who yearned for social interaction at work moved to places like Florida where Covid’s impact on social interaction was short-lived.
That’s why we closed the space in Stamford, CT but continue to be committed to help grow the few media innovators who value collaborative resilient relationships with employees, partners, customers. Few are up to this challenge. Those that are will have an enduring competitive advantage. We write about it here.
To read our insights into how comradity works, what the threats are, and opportunities to renew it, become a subscriber.