Leon Benjamin

Winning By Sharing is a term introduced into mainstream business language by Leon Benjamin in his book Winning By Sharing. It is defined as a state of cooperation between individuals, companies and nation states where there is a continuous fair exchange of value as opposed to the prevailing nature of business and government that is predicated on the notion of "I win. You lose." The term is derived from, and inspired by a number of ground breaking research findings most notably from Yochai Benkler (professor of Law at Yale University) and Jean Francois Noubel. Benkler's definitive paper, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, on the implications of the Open Source movement concludes that peer to peer sharing as a means of production is inherently more efficient and resilient than hierarchical, command and control organisational models. Noubel is a world expert on Collective Intelligence and states that "a company's future is less about the nature of its issues, and more about its capacity to invent social structures able to solve them." A more theoretical treatment of the Winning By Sharing concept can be understood by John Nash's Equilibrium successfully applied to dispute resolution in union negotiations in the 1960's. John Nash showed that "a state of a continuous fair exchange of value" exists for games with any number of players, resulting in win-win position for all players. Social software is playing a big part in transforming the way human beings connect, interrelate and cooperate, resulting in the reality of large numbers of individuals forming new types of organizations across space and time, historically speaking, a new phenomenon - a departure from the relentless and destructive pursuit of profit by the corporation. For the planet, our environment and nation states, social networks are enabling winning by sharing or rather: equitable re-distribution of wealth, reduced conflict, environmental sustainability, and critically, our long term survival as a species. Winning by Sharing is a future about less. But is also a future about better, described so eloquently by Robert Lion, in his article Doing Better With Less, which ends with; "Let's stop claiming to dominate nature and the world; let's stop making possession a superior end. Let's put our cherished deviancies, such as the manufacture of desire and its bulimic satisfaction, back in their place. Today's progress must be situated on the side of being rather than of having. Let us dream: A politician takes the side of talking to us about the world as it is, as it risks becoming; he or she forecasts not sweat and tears, but difficult tomorrows; she or he proposes that we talk about it, as responsible citizens, and allows us to perceive robust paths along which to advance, with a smile, towards the era of less ... A less that will consequently take on the character of better"