Good points. I'm wondering, where are the experts in social sector collaboration? Does Root Cause have an M&A department? ...

I've always liked the story of GE (at least as I've heard it), how the company began acquiring so many other companies that it could analyze its acquisitions for M&A best practices. Soon one of GE's advantages was that it could acquire companies more efficiently than its competitors. As a result, it could bid higher and more often, knowing that it could squeeze that much more out of the acquisition -- or abstain, knowing that the acquisition was less attractive than CW would say. ...

The idea, then, is that perhaps a social organization's theory of impact needs to include how well it works with others -- and its plan for continuously getting better at collaboration....

Assuming this hasn't been done yet, I'd like to think that if we surveyed the social sector and looked for organizations demonstratively better at collaboration, we could prove a correlation between excellent collaborative skills and social impact.