Last week I wrote: “We mustn’t fall for the temptation of thinking that the competition know something we don’t. Our contemporaries at other companies are almost certainly thinking exactly the same as we are.”
I received an interesting note from a reader saying that during the pandemic, he had taken the opportunity to contact some of those contemporaries, most of them direct ‘competitors’, and they now have a thriving WhatsApp group.
On more than one occasion in my own career, I’ve either created or been part of a chat group consisting of my peers. Our employers and their businesses may have been ‘competitors’, but that never meant we couldn’t help each other out with everyday issues.
There are of course many great groups linking people with similar job responsibilities or interests, on a local geographical basis. I’m sure many of us are members of these. However, communication systems like WhatsApp make it easy to connect with contemporaries in the same industry, no matter where they’re located.