“That’s a really cool plane,” I told Caleb, my 3-year-old, on seeing what he had built.

“It’s not a plane. It’s a jet,” he replied.

Caleb loves building planes and jets with his LEGO pieces.

“So when you become big, are you going to build planes and jets just as Boeing and Lockheed Martin do?” I asked, not really expecting a response.

“Dad, who’s Martin and when can you take me to his house so that I can play and build planes with him?” promptly came his response.

Somehow, many of us have negative thoughts about our competitors rather than positive plans about conversation and potential collaboration.

Maybe it’s Caleb’s childish innocence, not polluted or hardened by the realities of life, which helped him want to think first of “building together”.

Whenever I’ve reached out to “competitors”, the conversations almost always went much more positively than I’d hoped.

In a few cases, we’ve even decided to partner with them and share prospects to focus on our core competencies.