• Creating Wealth Collaboratively

    Collaboration is central to creating wealth. Contrary to the myth our star culture perpetuates, people working collaboratively achieve greater success than individuals. While some individuals may walk away with the lion’s share of the spoils, it takes a village to create their wealth. I’m glad that in his excellent page-one story in today’s New York Times headlined “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age” Louis Uchitelle includes steel baron Andrew Carnegie’s philosophy of wealth creation. You can read the story here.

    The story compares Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other billionaires with the super wealthy of yesteryear. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is that it quotes David Nasaw, author of the book Andrew Carnegie as saying that Carnegie believed “individuals do not create wealth by themselves.” Andrew_carnegie This, according to Nasaw, was fundamental to Carnegie’s gospel of wealth. In Carnegie’s view, the community creates wealth and individuals like him are simply trustees of wealth. Therefore, Carnegie gave most of his wealth back to the community in the form of libraries, museums, cultural centers and foundations.

    Carnegie’s philosophy applies today to how companies create value. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, companies in a variety of industries are achieving impressive results through collaboration. Among the organizations included in the book are Toyota, Boeing, The Dow Chemical Company, BMW, Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks Animation, Mayo Clinic, and the Myelin Repair Foundation. In each of these organizations, star culture takes a back seat to collaborative culture.

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  • Collaboration Produces First Boeing 787 Dreamliner

    On Sunday, Boeing unveiled its first 787 Dreamliner at the company’s final assembly plant in Everett, Washington. With former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw hosting the festivities, Boeing broadcasted and webcasted the event in nine languages to more than 45 countries. 787_launch Boeing Commercial Airplanes VP and GM Mike Bair made an important remark for those of us interested in collaboration: "I am so proud of the men and women of Boeing and of our partner employees in the 70 companies that have brought this airplane to the passengers of the world."

    Bair’s reference to “partner employees” is significant in that Boeing is moving away from designing and manufacturing planes by itself. Instead the company is becoming a large-scale systems integrator and collaborating with global partners to produce the 787 Dreamliner and other planes. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe the 3 levels of collaboration at Boeing and how CIO Scott Griffin and Sergey Kravchenko, president of Boeing Russia, worked together to create a real-time collaborative design environment and the culture to support it. The environment, culture and tools that Griffin and Kravchenko have implemented have helped create a more efficient and profitable business model for Boeing. 

    The book uses Boeing as a model for the global collaborative enterprise (GCE), which I define as “a collection of interdependent companies that engage in shared creation of value, often in real time.” The partner employees to which Mike Bair refers are the collaborators who comprise Boeing’s GCE. While more and more companies are collaborating internally, very few are in the same league with Boeing when it comes to collaborating with business partners.

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  • Visual Collaboration and a Prosecution Dream Team

    I had lunch the other day with J. Christopher Anderson, part of the prosecution “dream team” recently honored with a “home run hitters award” from the National District Attorney’s Association. The award stems from the efforts of Chris and his colleagues in the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office in Ohio to solve a cold murder case.

    The case involved the stabbing death in 1980 of a Toledo nun. Prosecutors persuaded a jury last year to convict Toledo priest Gerald Robinson of the murder. During the trial, witnesses testified that Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was stabbed 31 times, including nine wounds shaped like an inverted cross and made through an altar cloth.

    Chris mentioned how he and his colleagues are using the SMART Board interactive whiteboard from SMART Technologies in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. SMART is particularly helpful in presenting scientific evidence-oriented cases such as the Gerald Robinson trial, because prosecutors can mix images, video and other digital files on the board and annotate the content to help juries understand their arguments. In one case, Chris says he used the SMART board to demonstrate through an animation how a bullet pierced a door.

    Using interactive whiteboards helps collaborators achieve common goals. For prosecutors, the goal is a conviction. While using an interactive whiteboard at a trial is more presentation-oriented, prosecutors can also use such tools more collaboratively while developing trial strategy. And many other occupations can enhance goal achievement and collaboration through interactive whiteboards. For engineers, the goal might be designing a world-class skyscraper or developing a more effective integrated circuit. For businesspeople, the goal might be penetrating a new market.

    When we talk about collaboration tools, we’re usually referring to tools that collaborators in different locations use. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I point out that as distance collaboration tools get better, our challenge is to collaborate as effectively in the same room as we do remotely. Interactive whiteboards address this issue. We can push content from our laptops to the boards, group write documents, work together on graphic design or presentations, and even edit videos together in the same room. The take-away is that collaboration should be as effective when we’re sharing the same physical space as it is when we’re geographically-dispersed.

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  • Adobe Acrobat Connect for Collaboration

    I’ve been collaborating with a colleague in Minneapolis on new materials for The Culture of Collaboration™ Workshop. To bridge the distance gap, we’ve been using collaborative tools. One of those tools is Adobe Acrobat Connect, a subscription-based, hosted web conferencing service. Acrobat Connect is the latest incarnation of the Macromedia Breeze product, which Adobe rebranded after acquiring Macromedia in 2005. Acrobat Connect uses Adobe Flash Player, installed on roughly 97% of web browsers.

    The beauty of Acrobat Connect is its simplicity. The application launches with a single click from Microsoft Office or Adobe programs. Then you’re prompted to either share your screen immediately or send an email invitation to participants. The invitation includes a URL and an audio conference number with session code.

    Web conferencing is becoming more collaborative. The tool has traditionally been used for one-to-many or few-to-many presentations and training. By collaborative, I mean everybody can participate by simultaneously working on a document, spreadsheet or other program instead of one person clicking through slides while other people watch. True collaboration through web conferencing levels hierarchy by making all participants equal contributors, regardless of titles.

    In Acrobat Connect, the host can decide whether to share control of the session and let others annotate material. Sharing control is often a good idea, as noted above. For more on why, check out the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration in The Culture of Collaboration book.

    While Acrobat Connect includes a shared whiteboard with annotation tools, my colleague and I have been using the highlighters and other mark-up tools in Microsoft Word as we collaborate on The Culture of Collaboration™ Workshop materials. Incidentally, if you have a webcam and want to add videoconferencing to Acrobat Connect, that’s a single click.

    One thing to watch for…Adobe has made two recent acquisitions that should ultimately enable Acrobat Connect and other Adobe programs with IM and presence (for more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post). In January, Adobe acquired Antepo, an enterprise IM company and Amicima, a peer-to-peer networking company.

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  • Venture Capital and Global Collaboration

    Global collaboration is becoming a hot topic for venture capitalists whose US-based portfolio companies are expanding into China, India and other regions. I’m attending a gathering of venture capitalists this week, and the kick-off session was about how to expand winning companies globally.

    One VC panelist commented that the biggest problem for portfolio companies expanding globally is time zones. He explained that the COO may be in Japan, the CEO in California and the CTO and engineering team in Israel. “It’s so difficult to keep the communication flow among the management team,” he noted. The moderator asked the VC if there were any special tools that help. His response was “getting up early and going to bed late.” Another VC insisted that a range of tools including videoconferencing could close the distance gap for his portfolio companies.

    Paradoxically, distance can create value. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how collaborative companies like Boeing, Toyota and BMW leverage time zones, collaborative culture and tools to compress product cycle time. Clearly, chopping many months off a car or airplane development program creates substantial value. In the book, I also discuss Boeing’s use of mirror zones (see my March 16 post).

    Even early stage, venture-backed companies can turn time zone differences into assets. The key is for entrepreneurs (with guidance from VC’s) to integrate global collaboration into business models. Start-ups have an advantage over many later-stage enterprises, because they can bake collaborative culture into the company’s DNA right from the start.        

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  • Microsoft Upgrades Web Conferencing

    Web conferencing is becoming richer and more collaborative. Traditionally, the tool has been used for scheduled one-to-many events more than for spontaneous collaborative sessions. With the advent of presence (see my March 7 post), however, collaborators can easily escalate interaction from instant messaging to a web conference or videoconference.

    Microsoft revealed this morning at its TechEd conference in Orlando some features of the new version of its Live Meeting web conferencing service available in the fall. The same functionality will also become available in Microsoft’s upcoming release of its Office Communications Server 2007 product, now in public beta. The idea is to make on-the-fly collaborative sessions and scheduled meetings more like face-to-face encounters. The service is geared towards five kinds of web conferences:

    1) Spontaneous collaborative sessions

    2) Scheduled collaborative meetings

    3) Scheduled presentations

    4) Large public events

    5) Training.

    Live Meeting will support videoconferencing through webcams and RoundTable, a 360-degree panoramic video camera developed by Microsoft Research.  The new release has an active speaker function that switches the web cam video from one speaker to another. The new version of Live Meeting works with traditional phones and voice over IP and also integrates rich media such as Windows Media and Adobe Flash.

    What will ultimately transform collaborative sessions and meetings at a distance are searching and sifting functions, and Microsoft Research has done significant work in this area. The idea is that if you miss a meeting, you can quickly find relevant sections on demand. This release of Live Meeting includes the ability to record and search the audio and video based on the active speaker, the slide number and the elapsed time. But this is only the beginning.

    Soon intelligent meeting systems will let us search based on audio key words and video events such as people entering and leaving the meeting. This functionality exploits 360-degree cameras like RoundTable. Roundtable_2Ross Cutler and his colleagues at Microsoft Research developed RoundTable’s prototype and have written about distributed meeting systems. You can check out their work here and get an idea of the functionality on the horizon.

    Microsoft Office RoundTable (image courtesy of Microsoft)

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  • Star Culture Declining?

    NBC announced last week that it’s dropping Dateline anchor Stone Phillips as a cost-cutting measure. Pundits quickly sized up the move as representing the decline of network television news. This may be true, but there is a broader trend at play: it’s the beginning of the end of star culture.

    NBC has been willing to pay Phillips a fancy salary, because the network was convinced that Phillips’ star power attracted viewers at least as much as the investigative journalism Dateline provides. I know a former Dateline producer who frequently referred to Phillips as the star and had to make appointments with Phillips’ secretary to work with him on stories.

    And for years, local TV stations have promoted anchors as faces you can trust. However, that’s changing. One mid-sized NBC affiliate now rarely promotes its main anchor. I know this, because the anchor is a friend of mine. But other stations are promoting anchors less and instead making news promos about viewers and their interests.

    In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the Myth of the Single Cowboy and how many organizations embrace a star culture. You can read more about this in the book’s introduction. The point I make is that collaborative culture creates greater value than star culture. While star culture still pervades business, the media and our collective consciousness; we’re starting to see a chink in the armor.

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  • Intuit and Collaboration

    Intuit, like many software vendors, has its sites on collaboration. Recently, I had an interesting conversation with Bill Lucchini and Peter Fearey of Intuit’s QuickBase business unit. Bill, the vice president and general manager of QuickBase, is a thirteen-year Intuit veteran. Peter, who handles product management, used to work at Apple.

    QuickBase is quietly making inroads into enterprises with a suite of online productivity applications. Reportedly, 45 of Fortune 100 companies use QuickBase. In true Web 2.0 fashion, all users need is a browser. So these applications typically run under the radar of the IT department. It’s easy to input an Excel spreadsheet into QuickBase. Multiple users can then update the spreadsheet, and they can set email alerts so that each collaborator knows when a colleague has made changes. Users can also customize their own QuickBase applications for managing everything from the office coffee fund to inventory. 

    Not surprisingly, Procter & Gamble is using QuickBase. P&G, which I wrote about in The Culture of Collaboration book, is a collaborative company that is open to exploring how new tools can create value.

    While the QuickBase approach to collaboration has been asynchronous to date, the team is considering adding such real-time capabilities as instant messaging and web conferencing. So if a user is working in a QuickBase application, he or she could spontaneously invite a colleague to join. Such a move could make Intuit a more formidable force in collaboration.

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  • Collaboration on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner

    I’m glad to see that Design News published an article in its May 15 issue about how global collaboration is making a difference for Boeing on the 787 Dreamliner project. You can read the article here. The article even includes a photo taken for The Culture of Collaboration book of Boeing’s Global Collaboration Center in Everett, Washington.

    The Design News article provides useful insight into how Boeing uses Dassault Systemes’ product lifecycle management tools including Catia, version 5. In the book, I describe the interplay of tools, environment, and culture in Boeing’s global collaborative enterprise (GCE) and delineate three levels of collaboration at Boeing. The book also explains how Boeing maximizes mirror zones (see my March 16 post).

    Incidentally, the book defines the global collaborative enterprise (GCE) as a collection of interdependent companies that engage in shared creation of value, often in real time. Boeing is an excellent example of a GCE in that Boeing and its global partners work together seamlessly as if there were no geographical boundaries. But there’s an automobile company that is also setting the standard for GCE’s. Can you guess which company?

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  • Collaboration and Unified Communications

    Microsoft invited me to San Francisco’s Le Meridien Hotel last Thursday for an excellent salad nicoise and a preview of new “unified communications” devices. Microsoft and nine partners are officially introducing those devices this morning at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles. The devices are presence-enabled, which means they integrate well with instant messaging buddy or colleague lists and corporate directories.

    Chris Cullin, director of product management for Microsoft’s unified communications group, and his colleagues transformed a conference room into three separate work environments for the information worker, the executive, and the mobile professional. The environments included PCs running Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 and presence-enabled devices including IP phones, Bluetooth headsets and monitors optimized for videoconferencing.

    Using the tools with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, it’s easy to see which colleagues are available and connect with them on the fly. By clicking an icon, I could escalate an instant messaging session into a voice or video call.

    Not surprisingly, the executive work environment offered the most compelling devices including Polycom’s CX700 IP Phone.

    Polycomcx700phone_2 

    The phone has an integrated finger print reader, embedded Office Communicator 2007 and many bells and whistles including full duplex speakerphone capability. As soon as the user touches the finger print reader, his or her presence status switches to available and colleagues know that he or she is ready to communicate and collaborate on the fly.

    Collaboration requires the right culture, tools and environment. Microsoft, Polycom and other partners have successfully tackled the tools part of the equation and will help countless enterprises take communication and real-time collaboration to a new level. For enterprises to create value through collaboration, however, they must do more than adopt tools. The real challenge, as I point out in my book, is to foster collaborative culture.

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