I sat in a meeting earlier this week and listened to a description of how collaboration can be viewed as a strength, a “big idea,” and an impediment.  One of my colleagues in the room expressed surprise at the last notion, that collaboration could be a negative prospect. I found the conversation fascinating, and I thought a lot about how collaboration can in fact be an impediment.

I didn’t watch this entire interview conducted by Piers Morgan, just the clip below.   In this particular segment, Kirk Cameron manages to talk his way out of Piers’ attack on his belief system regarding homosexuality.  He stays calm, and he doesn’t get aggressive.  His position on homosexuality makes me crazy and I worry for his children’s well-being, but he does appear to have thought his position through, unlike many other people who subscribe to this kind of rhetoric.

My colleague, Chris Stipeck, who I’ve worked with for 5+ years, sent me an article by Ian Parker that appears in the February 6, 2012 edition of The New Yorker entitled “The Story of a Suicide.”  The article outlines in great detail the incidents leading up to the death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi in September 2010.  Clementi’s roommate Dharun Ravi is currently on trial for a slew of charges pending from an incident where he videotaped Clementi having a sexual encounter with another man. After Clementi discovered this invasion of his privacy and the supposed broadcasting of his encounter into cyberworld, Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge, killing himself, and igniting a firestorm of national attention around bullying, or what some have come to call social combat, a term that I prefer because of its weight and scope.

Today ABC News began releasing excerpts of an interview with Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, who alleges that Newt asked her to allow him to have a mistress while they stayed married.  When the interviewer asked her what she thought Newt was trying to say to her, Marianne, replied, “Oh, he was asking to have an open marriage, and I refused.”