“Collaborative”

Michael Leahy, Maryland CIO

My unfavorite buzzwords these days are pretty typical — things like “synergy.” I still hear that a lot. And everything has to be “collaborative.” My concern with “collaborative” is that it’s thrown in as a meaningless adjective whether people are actually making an effort to collaborate. “Collaborate” means to constructively approach something in a way that both parties gain from the transaction, whereas we typically use the word “collaborative” to mean more than one person is involved. It’s sort of like the legal definition of a conspiracy.