Why Circles of Collaboration Now, The Return of Ancient Wisdom in Modern Workplaces

My book, Circles of Collaboration, has been a long time coming, and it is now available for preorder.

For years, I felt uncomfortable when people asked me to share my leadership journey. As the president of a successful thirty-five-year-old company, and having sat on numerous boards of directors, I have enjoyed success in business. I'm considered a 'leader'. I also work as a strategic consultant for political campaigns, corporations, entrepreneurs, and private equity firms. So yes, I have a leadership journey to share from their point of view. I understood the question.

But from my perspective, I wasn’t so sure. The title fit. But the framework never felt like mine.

I didn’t want to be a leader in the traditional, top-down sense. And I certainly didn’t want to be a follower. So what did I want?

Eventually, I realized that my best moments, my most effective, creative, energizing moments, aren’t about leading from the front or falling in line behind someone else. They’re about sitting in a circle. Collaborating. Co-creating. That’s where I come alive. That’s where I see others shine as well.

When I began working on this book with my collaborator and co-author, Leslie Grossman, I started to really examine where those instincts came from. I also did the homework. I went deep into the research. And what I found was both obvious and awe-inspiring. Turns out, we women have always leaned toward collaboration. Toward shared effort, mutual respect, and collective intelligence. Even after centuries of being told to set those instincts aside and fit into patriarchal pyramid hierarchies, we’ve carried collaboration with us. Quietly. Steadily. Persistently.

Now, we don’t need to carry it in secret anymore. Women have agency. We have money, which is really the currency for the freedom to build our future the way we want.

But we need to be clear about what real collaboration actually is. It’s not consensus. It’s not just about harmony or teamwork. It’s about building smarter outcomes by bringing the right people to the table, and allowing each of them to operate from their area of strength and power.

When collaboration is done well, no one person is filtering, censoring, or distorting what’s coming into the room. There’s no bottleneck at the top. The group becomes sharper, not slower. Stronger, not softer. The solution that emerges is richer because it’s drawn from different vantage points, different disciplines, different truths.

That’s the kind of collaboration I believe in. That’s the model we need more of, at work, in life. That’s what we prove works in the book.

Let me give you just one example.

Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University that has been touted as one of the best ever given. He worked on it for months. Every idea was his. Every anecdote came from his life. He wrote it all out, spent hours crafting it, made it the best he could.

And then, what did he do?

He went to his circle of collaborators. One of the people in his circle was Aaron Sorkin, the most compelling communicator amongst his circle. You all remember Aaron Sorkin. The West Wing. A Few Good Men. Arguably the greatest dialogue writer in television and film alive today. Jobs invited him in to bring his genius to the final product. Not to change what Jobs wanted to say. Not to revise the message. But to elevate it. He didn't waste anyone else's time. Aaron's expertise was what he needed. A circle of two people. Now, I recognize that we don't all have an Aaron Sorkin in our circles, but make no mistake, if you work your circles from the time you are a Girl Scout on, you will have the collaborators you need. And you will be helpful to others as well. And what a life. What an exciting life of time well spent. Using people to their highest potential. Knowing you are using your own gifts where they will make a difference.

That’s collaboration. Knowing where your genius lies, and welcoming the genius of others. Jobs respected that Sorkin knew what would resonate from the podium that day better than he would. He trusted it. Sorkin had earned that trust.

That is what Circles of Collaboration is all about. Spending your life building those circles around you. Cultivating them. Knowing how to draw on them. Knowing how to be in the circle of others, whose vision is not your own, but you can bring your genius to their destination, and they to yours. Knowing which decision needs which individuals brought into the circle.

Imagine a world where collaboration replaced leadership.

Circles of Collaboration is the start of the blueprint for that world. It is not about abandoning leadership. It is about redefining it. About remembering that we’ve had this model all along, and it works. This is the first edition of what I know will, as it is refined in the coming years and used more and more, become a centerpiece of our core business practices.

The book will give you the history I had no idea existed. How the collaboration among women in Salem was working so well that the brimstone from the pulpit pastor had to destroy them or risk becoming irrelevant. It will show how some of the most successful women in business today can trace their achievements directly to their circles of collaboration. And get this. The men who became the Impressionist artists in France? They met every week in a circle of collaboration, working through their new art form together, supporting one another while the traditional art world shut them out. They refined the work together. So yes, men have used the technique when it came to the arts. But when it shows up in business? Not so much.

We redefine quid pro quo, taking it out of the evil category it doesn’t belong in. We clarify the difference between networking and nurturing collaborative circles. And doing the ask, that out-of-reach asset for so many women, myself included, becomes easier when we understand how it naturally fits into the framework of circles. It’s not transactional. It’s relational. And that shift changes everything.

We spent two years writing this book. We can't wait to learn what needs refinement, additional research, and how we can take the language that is no longer useful and replace it with something better.

Preorders for Circles of Collaboration are now available in paperback via the Apricity Publishing website and as an e-book on Kindle via Amazon. I hope you’ll join this circle.

By Christine Merser

Christine Merser is a writer, strategist, and storyteller whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. With a sharp eye for what lies beneath the surface, she explores themes of identity, power, and personal transformation, especially in the lives of women. Her debut novel, Flight of the Starling, is the first in a fiction trilogy already being called “made for Netflix.” Her nonfiction book, Circles of Collaboration, offers insight into women’s leadership and collective purpose, while her memoir, The Letter, chronicles the complex, beautiful, and often challenging relationship with her mother. She also writes two Substack columns, America Interrupted Dispatch, a personal take on today’s political landscape, and The Voice Inside My Head, where she occasionally shares her reflections and musings.