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Cooperation, I find, is tougher than competition. By default, every living individual has to compete. There's no other way. It's cooperation that takes a lot of doing. Cooperation is a choice. Competition isn't. If you choose to escape one competition, you invariably run into another. 

My Dad's into the natural stones (meant for flooring, wall cladding & construction) business. The market is almost like a perfect competition. Differentiation has been hard to build and market. Every city has a natural stones market and it's so perfectly competitive. But businessmen have survived, probably because of decent margins.

Businesses into natural stones have faced a stiff competition for many years from marketers of vitrified tiles – often known as flooring tiles (they are available in many types) or marbonite (for artificial marble and artificial granite). Vitrified tiles have many benefits and they are back by marketers with huge marketing budgets and a huge salesforce. They hire professionally qualified people. In contrast, a typical natural stone business might have on an average just about 20 people. Those too not very well qualified. To top that, there's no concept like a marketing budget in their business.

In my many discussions, people from natural stone business have expressed fears about the bad state of business. Every time, I've posed just one question. Why don't you cooperate with each other, form a joint stock company and take advantage of economies of scale? You could have more people to handle different responsibilities, more money to devote to marketing, could do with lesser inventory, could hire professionally qualified marketing force and so on…

Every time the discussion falls flat.

Similar situation can be seen in many many other types of businesses. Grocery retail for example. Perishable goods retail as well. Garment retailing. You can name them one after another. Small shops and vendors go out of business but rarely initiate a process of cooperation among themselves.

Cooperation need not be practiced only when life is at stake. Cooperation could be one of the biggest strategies for Indian small businesses to survive and flourish. Indeed, effort's needed but the result is a good life. A great life. Great example: Amul (Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd.), the biggest cooperative movement of Indian business, arguably of the world business. 

A business program needed on cooperation.