Articles

  • Toyota’s Collaborative Leadership Involves “See it for Yourself”

    In selecting Akio Toyoda as its next president, Toyota is reaffirming its commitment to collaborative Akio Toyoda culture and methods. A key tenet of Toyota is genchi genbutsu which means "see it for yourself.” This is related to the leadership method practiced by HP’s David Packard and Bill Hewlett beginning in the 1940’s and later dubbed “management by walking around.” The idea is that to figure out what’s really going on in an organization, a leader needs to get out of the office, go to factories and loading docks and retail outlets, and get his or her hands dirty.

     

    That’s exactly what Akio Toyoda did when he visited a Toyota dealership in Ann Arbor, Michigan last summer. He wanted to personally investigate a pickup truck recall. A story by Micheline Maynard on February 15, 2009 in the New York Times says Toyoda made a trip “so secret that Toyota’s public relations staff didn’t know he was here.” While at the dealership, he reportedly got down on his hands and knees to examine the undercarriage of a truck. At the news conference in January announcing his appointment, according to the Times, Toyoda announced he would pop up everywhere as he did in Ann Arbor.

     

    Genchi genbutsu or “see it for yourself” fits squarely into collaborative culture and methods. However, it’s not always possible to fly across the world to see what’s happening. That’s where collaborative tools come into play. Through unified communications, we can find one other and connect regardless of level, role or region. We can escalate IM to voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing and spontaneously hash out problems and make decisions. Visual communications is a critical enabler. An ideal solution is telepresence, which makes people feel practically as if they’re sharing the same physical space regardless of distance.  

     

    Our research at The Culture of CollaborationÒ Institute has shown that almost all highly-collaborative companies have integrated some form of real-time, interactive video into their operations. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, Toyota uses a custom-designed visual communications system coupled with product lifecycle management and advanced computer-aided design tools that has become essential to its operations. The system links people at design facilities, plants, and at business partner sites and provides a rich virtual environment for developing and producing vehicles.

     

    Two other areas involving collaboration that Akio Toyoda will likely re-emphasize:

    1)     Making decisions based on long-term goals rather than on short-term developments

    2)     Nemawashi or making decisions slowly by consensus

     

    While collaborative culture is never about one person, Akio Toyoda is certainly one role model for collaborative leadership.

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  • Architectural Collaboration and the California Academy of Sciences

    As I gazed at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper and other amazingly-clear star formations last Thursday evening, there was no distraction from city lights or from the fog that often defines San Francisco.

    I was sitting in the world’s largest digital planetarium, which uses real-time data from NASA plus immersive video technology. The NASA data accurately represents the current night sky, and the immersive video technology makes visitors feel like they’re travelling through space.

     

    The star-studded evening program was a departure from the usual daytime planet presentation in honor not only of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday last Thursday evening, but also of the launch of NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences. NightLife is a weekly Thursday evening event featuring bars, food plus all of the Academy exhibits. 

     

    I walked, Lagunitas India Pale Ale in hand, through the recently-reopened museum and marveled at the Rainforest Exterior four-story glass rainforest with its colorful poison frogs and Borneo bats and the graceful movement of jellyfish in the Steinhart aquarium, which includes thirty-eight thousand animals. Aside from official certifications that the Academy is the “greenest” museum on the planet, I found the museum’s “Living Roof” stunning and unique.   Living Roof The 197-thousand foot roof features seven hills containing many native plant species. The concept was to blend the building’s environment with that of Golden Gate Park and to reduce the Academy’s energy needs by creating oxygen, capturing rainwater and avoiding the heat-trapping disadvantages of tar-and-asphalt roofs.

     

    After a decade of planning and $500 million in expenses, the Academy reopened last fall to much fanfare.

    At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interesting story by John Cote that described how the Academy’s board of directors chose an architectural team for the project. By July of 1999, the board had reportedly narrowed its search to five finalists. According to the story, a British architect arrived with five associates, two trays of slides and detailed mockups of two specific designs. He spoke for an hour and a half.

     

    When it was Italian architect Renzo Piano’s turn, he began by rearranging the room chairs in a circle. He then used a blank pad to sketch as he listened to board members describe the importance of nature, biodiversity, and naturalistic forms. Renzo Piano Ultimately, Piano and his team got the job because of his collaborative approach. Rather than simply presenting options to the board, Piano engaged and involved his client. The result reflects broad input and the collaborative sessions between architect and client.

     

    Too often in organizations, people make decisions in a vacuum. Those decisions are handed down to people who must implement them. This causes a chasm between the decision makers and the decision implementers and many others who are impacted by decisions. Then there’s a lot of talk like “They want us to ….” Or “they’ve decided that we’re supposed to….” So, an “us and them” mentality develops and sucks the motivation, innovation and value out of an organization.

     

    In contrast, collaborative organizations make decisions by involving and engaging people across levels, functions, business units and regions. When people have a stake in decisions, “us and them” dissolves. I’ve written in The Culture of Collaboration book and in this blog about the interplay of culture, environment and tools in sparking collaboration. In his initial session with the Academy’s board, Renzo Piano used all three. He changed the culture by involving the board in the conceptual process. He redesigned the environment by rearranging the rooms chairs in a circle. And he used a blank sketch pad as a collaborative tool.

     

    It’s a reminder—one that we stress in The Culture of CollaborationÒ Workshop—that collaborative culture can begin with a team gathering or a spontaneous exchange. In the case of the California Academy of Sciences, the result is an extraordinarily functional and “green” architectural masterpiece.

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  • Virtual Events Becoming Economic Necessity

    Companies in many industries are slashing conference, trade show and sales meeting budgets and replacing traditional events with virtual ones. Publishing is one such industry. According to a story in last Monday’s New York Times, Macmillan will hold two out of three of its 2009 sales conferences virtually via web conferencing. This contrasts sharply with the sales and marketing meeting Macmillan held at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego last month during which participants participated in wine tastings and got massages. 

     

    However, it takes more than adopting tools for virtual events to become a collaborative organization. For many companies, true collaboration requires a wholesale shift. Exigent circumstances can raise consciousness for the shift even in otherwise intransigent cultures. Exigent circumstances include industry realignments, disruptive technology, new competition, and economic downturns.

    Facing market challenges in the current recession, many companies are getting a wake up call. 

     

    Sparked by reduced budgets, many companies are accelerating their adoption or use of real-time collaborative tools to transform their events and meetings into virtual encounters. These tools include virtual worlds, telepresence, web conferencing and videoconferencing.

     

    The right tool choice depends on situations and cultures. For external events such as trade shows and job fairs, it’s necessary to create an experience that will draw people to a brand. To recreate that experience virtually, the 3D immersive quality of virtual worlds like Second Life or Qwaq makes sense. Qwaq is geared to business users and combines an immersive experience with web conferencing functionality. So users can work together while sharing applications in a virtual auditorium or conference room. CNN recently ran an interesting story on virtual trade shows. You can view the story here.

     

    For leadership retreats, strategy sessions and board meetings, detecting subtleties such as eye movement is critical. Therefore, telepresence fits the bill, because of its quality visual experience and the feeling that participants are sharing the same space.  To replace a data-driven sales meeting, web conferencing makes sense because the focus is on the slides or spreadsheet more than people. For a cross-functional meeting that includes, say, sales and marketing people, relationship time is necessary before plunging into data. In that case, telepresence or videoconferencing is appropriate.

     

    For Macmillan and other organizations, creating value through collaboration requires more than holding two out of three sales conferences virtually. So, perhaps Macmillan is considering adopting collaboration more broadly. It’s time to move beyond sporadic, scheduled use of collaborative tools. Value-driven organizations are integrating collaborative practices and tools into work styles and collaborative culture into organizational DNA.

     

    In this downturn, the smart money is rethinking how we do business, reconsidering command-and-control approaches, and moving collaboration to the front burner. This will help organizations survive short term and thrive long term.

     

     

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  • Mentoring Key to Collaboration

    Business is rediscovering mentoring, and the economic downturn is accelerating this trend.

     

    In this challenging economic climate, organizations are realizing that the expertise of veteran team members coupled with the fresh ideas and enthusiasm of younger team members can drive innovation and profitability. Besides developing deep industry and functional expertise over time, veteran team members have weathered previous economic storms—so that experience is an added driver.

     

    Mentoring is essential to collaboration and is therefore a critical component of a collaborative culture. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I identify eleven approaches a leader can use to instill collaborative culture, and establishing a mentoring system is at the top of the list. Mentoring systems can be formal or informal. Intel has established a formal mentoring process that includes an intranet-based system that matches protégés with mentors. Intel has also institutionalized mentoring through job sharing. Two leaders with complimentary skills may co-lead a business unit.

     

    According to an August 18, 2008 story in The Wall Street Journal by George Anders headlined “Companies Try to Extend Researchers’ Productivity,” Texas Instruments is formally matching new hires with mentors called “craftsmen” who coach their protégés. New design engineers, writes Anders, can become “fully effective” in three or four years instead of five to seven.

     

    Some companies that were founded on collaborative principles or have developed a collaborative culture over decades have successfully used informal mentoring. In these organizations, people naturally seek out mentors throughout the organization. Many Japanese companies, notably Toyota, successfully practice informal mentoring. For less-collaborative companies seeking to instill a collaborative culture, however, it’s essential to establish a formal mentoring system.

     

    There are many types of mentoring relationships relevant to organizations. The traditional relationship is between an older, wiser mentor and a younger, motivated protégé. For this approach to work, the organizational culture and HR practices must value the contributions of team members regardless of age and must acknowledge that team members develop at different paces. Some team members contribute the most late in their careers, and typical performance evaluation systems fail to account for this. Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, addresses the disconnect between evaluation methodology and individual talents. For more on Gladwell’s Outliers, see my June 6, 2008 post.

    Mentoring can transcend the traditional age-oriented mentor/protégé relationship. People with complimentary skills can mentor each other. For this arrangement to work, people must easily morph from the role of mentor to that of protégé in much the same way as a graduate student may teach undergraduates in the morning and become an apprentice to a professor in the afternoon.

    Mayo Clinic’s collaborative leadership model pairs a doctor with a professional administrator for each leadership role. Aside from bringing his or her medical knowledge to decision-making, the doctor’s responsibility is to advocate the patient’s perspective in developing policy. The administrator brings a complementary perspective involving things like business processes. Dr. Glenn Forbes, CEO of the Mayo Clinic’s Rochester, Minnesota campus, told me when I was researching the book that he has had about a dozen leadership partnerships at Mayo. In some partnerships, he has played more of a mentor and in other cases he has played more of a protégé. The mentor and protégé roles are dynamic in a collaborative culture.

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  • Spontaneous Telepresence and Cisco’s Collaboration Advances

    An overlooked aspect of Cisco’s announcement yesterday of its new collaboration portfolio is tighter integration between the company’s telepresence and unified communications product lines. Collaboration tools are far more valuable—both from the vendor and customer perspectives—as part of an integrated strategy rather than as stand-alone solutions.

     

    So far, telepresence has been largely limited to scheduled sessions and has had little integration with unified communications. The real benefit of unified communications is that it enables spontaneous encounters. Unified communications leverages presence (not to be confused with telepresence). Presence lets colleagues find each other, view each other’s availability on “buddy” lists or corporate directories and connect spontaneously through instant messaging, voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing. It’s also possible to do 1-click escalation from one mode to another.

     

    The capability to connect spontaneously is essential in supporting the cultural shift to real-time collaboration. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, the move towards collaborative business models is about shifting from the pass-along approach to work to “do it now together.” So as telepresence becomes integrated with unified communications, users will be able to escalate on the fly from IM, voice, and web conferencing to telepresence.

     

    Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand Cisco’s new TelePresence Expert on Demand integrates the immersive experience of telepresence with call handling features of unified communications. The product is optimized for business-to-consumer scenarios. A bank branch customer interested in a specialized loan investment or comprehensive relationship can connect instantly with the right expert (read salesperson) in a remote location. Patients at a regional medical clinic can gain access to specialist doctors. “The customer feels as if he or she is sitting across the desk from the expert,” notes Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.

     

    Using telepresence in this way is new and will provide many opportunities. However, the concept of expert on demand using video seems newer than it is. After a discussion last week with Chris Thompson about Cisco's upcoming announcement and uses for Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand, I flipped through a book I wrote that was published in 1996 called Personal Videoconferencing. The book describes a broad range of uses for videoconferencing including the expert-on-demand model that Cisco is now marketing for telepresence. Experts I wrote about ranged from financial specialists to doctors to educators. At the time, US Bank, Huntington Bancshares and Citibank were conducting pilot programs using video banking kiosks linking customers with financial product specialists.

     

    Telemedicine typically uses real-time video communications to link doctors with patients, doctors with doctors, and other health professionals with doctors and patients. As part of extensive research into telemedicine I began conducting in the 1990’s, I spent time with telehome nurses who deliver expertise to patients via video. While telepresence is currently cost-prohibitive for most home use, the technology could be used in nursing homes and care centers. Here’s a link to a column I wrote in 1997 on telehome healthcare for Telemedicine Today magazine.

     

    Telemedicine can extend medical specialties to underserved populations including rural areas, developing countries and prisons. Considering that a drawback of telemedicine is the sub-optimal virtual environment of standard videoconferencing, telepresence could significantly enhance the experience for both patients and doctors.

     

    While researching telemedicine in 1999, I visited Pelican Bay State Prison, a maximum security facility which houses California’s most violent criminal offenders. Pelican Bay is in Crescent City, California, a rural community where there is a real shortage of doctors, particularly specialists. Because many of California’s prisons are in underserved areas, the California Department of Corrections began using telemedicine in the late 1990’s to link doctors with inmates. Gastroenterologists, psychiatrists and other specialists saw patients at prisons throughout California via video from a telemedicine services center in Sacramento. Primary care doctors were on site with the patients. Telepresence could have enhanced these consultations.

     

    Cisco’s TelePresence Expert on Demand will enhance remote expert applications with a more immersive and natural experience. Also, the product is a major step towards integrating telepresence with unified communications. Cisco says that full integration of telepresence with unified communications for enterprise collaboration is in the works. That advance is essential, because telepresence will become more spontaneous and part of work flow.

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  • Malcolm Gladwell: Measurement Methods Killing Creativity and Innovation

    Malcolm Gladwell is about to turn talent recruitment and development upside down. Malcolm GladwellLast Monday at the American Society for Training and Development 2008 International Conference and Exposition in San Diego, I talked with Malcolm about his forthcoming book.

     

    Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t tackles everything from college and graduate school admissions to organizational performance evaluations. An outlier is a statistical term meaning a significant deviation from the mean. The book, which will be published in November, is based largely on the work of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago. For more on Galenson’s work, read the story entitled “What Kind of Genius Are You?” that Daniel H. Pink wrote for the July, 2006 issue of Wired.

     

    Gladwell’s point is that there’s a disconnect between methodology for evaluating people and individual talents. He’s wary of efforts to predict performance and suspicious of set timeframes to perform. “We’ve become obsessed with this notion that everything can be measured with numbers,” Malcolm insists. “It’s a cultural fixation.” While law schools are obsessed with LSAT scores, Gladwell notes, studies show that people who are admitted with lower scores show no difference 20 years out than those with high scores.

     

    Gladwell uses the artists Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne to illustrate two key types of people. Picassos succeed quickly and often peak early, while Cezannes are typically late bloomers who rely on technique and process and make incremental advances to build a body of work over time. “A late bloomer gives us something you can’t get from a precocious artist. The work is much more powerful and has deeper depth,” says Gladwell. The HBO series, The Sopranos, took three seasons to catch on, Gladwell notes, but ultimately the show developed a deeper level of emotional connection with the audience. This is because HBO is willing to carry a portfolio of under performers; the network realizes the potential for a long-term winner among them.

     

    At the ASTD conference, I engaged Malcolm about organizational culture, and he agreed that culture plays a huge role in how people are recruited and evaluated. Organizations are clearly comprised of both Picassos and Cezannes, but there is also a collective approach that favors one style over the other. Particularly relevant to collaboration is Malcolm’s use of the U.S. vs. the Japanese auto industry to illustrate his point.  I have written extensively about how collaboration has created substantial value for Toyota and how people throughout the organization provide input into decisions, which are made slowly and carefully. Toyota focuses on incremental improvements over time and building long-term value, a Cezanne approach. Malcolm notes that Detroit-based automakers traditionally rely on big, bold ideas like the SUV and muscle cars. This is more Picasso-like.

     

    The problem is that measurement and evaluation usually favors Picassos over Cezannes. Organizations value the sprinters over the distance runners and too often sideline people who develop deeper depth over time. Innovation and productivity suffer, because key resources are wasted. This will evolve as organizations become more collaborative, harness talent in all its forms and realize the limitations of a single performance template. Enron selected top performers and pitted them off against each other through “rank and yank.” This created a culture of fear rather than one of collaboration. The company had little tolerance for Cezannes. Look where Enron is now—bankrupt.

     

    Incidentally, Malcolm’s Wikipedia entry notes that he was an outstanding middle distance runner in high school…

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  • BMW, Daimler and Collaborating with Competitors

    Manu12lowres1_3 Collaborating with competitors involves yin and yang, two opposing and simultaneously complementary facets of a single phenomenon. This balance can create substantial value, particularly when the collaboration involves common processes that provide no competitive advantage. An example of this is the Exostar consortium, which has brought efficiencies to purchasing through a shared, online environment.

    BMW is currently in talks with its competitor, Daimler, to produce and purchase vehicle components including engines. As a story by Edward Taylor in today’s Wall Street Journal points out, Germany’s archrival luxury car makers have determined that collaboration may give them bigger economies of scale to prevent further erosion of margins.

    Ford Motor Company has successfully reduced costs by sharing components across its brands. The premise is that there are many commodity parts that have little to do with customer perception of brand value. In Ford’s C-Car shared technologies program, engineers and executives of Mazda (partially owned by Ford), Ford Europe and Volvo collaborated to reduce development costs for specific small car models. An added benefit is that Ford has reduced internal competition among brands and increased the sharing of best practices.

    Since BMW and Daimler are smaller than Ford, the German companies have fewer opportunities to achieve economies of scale without collaborating across company lines. The Wall Street Journal quotes a source who says that executives and engineers from both companies “from the top right down to the middle management” are discussing collaboration.

    My experience in working with numerous organizations on implementing collaboration is that a bottom/up strategy is just as important as top/down. For BMW or Daimler to collaborate with an arch rival involves a cultural shift, and there will undoubtedly be resistance. Therefore, leaders must engage and involve team members at all levels and corners of the organization in this shift so that both organizations will ultimately embrace the new way of working. 

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  • Washington Times Understands The Culture of Collaboration

    Many traditional media outlets have difficulty understanding collaboration. Newspapers, magazines and TV networks are typically steeped in star culture and embrace competition. So the notion that collaborative culture is changing business models and the nature of work leaves many reporters and editors scratching their heads.

    Last Sunday, however, The Washington Times showed that it’s head and shoulders above most other traditional media outlets when it comes to understanding collaborative culture and the future of business. For a media outlet to capture the essence of collaboration, the reporter and his or her editor need to be on the same page—collaborating, if you will. Clearly, this occurred at The Washington Times. The paper selected James Srodes to review The Culture of Collaboration book. You can read the review here. Srodes, a veteran business writer, is well-suited to understand the value of collaboration. He is the former Washington bureau chief for both Forbes and Financial World magazines.

    According to Srodes’ web site, he is also the biographer of Benjamin Franklin, auto industry maverick John DeLorean and Allen Dulles. Dulles served as the director of central intelligence under U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Currently, the intelligence community is working on adopting a more collaborative culture.

    In The Washington Times, Srodes writes:

    “Where once there were chains of command, flows of information (and power), central locations and memo buck slips of Talmudic complexity and obtuseness, technology has made it possible for diverse creative and managerial teams operating in locations around the globe to work simultaneously on projects that bring better, cheaper, more effective products on line at an accelerated pace.”

    At the end of the review, Srodes notes that the culture of collaboration “may be the most exciting business development since the assembly line.”

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  • Is Ford’s New Marketing Head a Star? Plus Keith Richards Provides Collaboration Insight

    James Farley is no star, but The New York Times would have us think otherwise. Farley is Ford Motor Company’s new group vice president of marketing and communications. He took the job after spending seventeen years at Toyota, most recently as group vice president and general manager of Lexus.

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    The Times ran as its business section lead last Sunday a story about Farley headlined “A Star at Toyota, A Believer at Ford.” There is little in the story that would suggest Farley is a star, but the Times nevertheless packaged the story in a way that perpetuates the Myth of the Single Cowboy. This is the notion that one self-sufficient, rugged individual can achieve smashing success without help from anybody. We turn athletes, chefs, surgeons, politicians, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders into stars. The media drives this myth into our living rooms, our organizations and into our consciousness.

    In the same edition as the Farley story, the Times travel section’s first page promoted a story on French chefs on page 7 as “The New Culinary Stars of Bordeaux.” What about the line cooks, the prep people, the servers and the expeditors? It takes more than a single, star chef to prepare a meal in an upscale restaurant. But the Times and many other media outlets would prefer that we believe one person makes it all happen.

    Toyota emphasizes collaboration over star culture. Farley clearly chalked up significant achievements at Toyota, because he collaborated across levels, functions and business units. Rather than practicing shoot-from-the-hip management, Toyota leaders practice nemawashi, which means literally “to prepare a tree’s roots for the soil.” Nemawashi is essentially about getting broad input into decisions and making decisions slowly by consensus. As a star, Farley could never have achieved much at Toyota. As a collaborator, Farley and his colleagues created considerable value.

    Over the weekend, I saw the awesome IMAX version of the new Rolling Stones movie, Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the film, Keith Richards discusses his guitar prowess as compared with that of Ron Wood, who shares with Richards the title co-lead guitarist of the Stones. “We’re both pretty lousy, but together we’re better than ten others,” Richards says. This sums up the value of collaboration over star culture.

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  • Real-Time Collaboration Transforming Social Networking

    Many organizations think they’re collaborating by making internal social networking available. However, many minimally-collaborative people have personal sites. Enabling social networking with real-time functionality creates new possibilities for organizational collaboration.

    I gave a speech several months ago to U.S. government officials who are focused on getting agencies to collaborate. The agencies were using wikis and a sort of internal MySpace, and the culture was in the early stages of becoming collaborative. A central theme of my talk was how real-time collaboration is changing business models and how we work.

    Presence, I explained to the government audience, would soon transform social networking by letting us know who’s online and available for spontaneous interaction. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. With a single click from somebody’s MySpace page or the internal equivalent, a colleague could launch an instant messaging session. The collaborators could then escalate the chat into a web conference or videoconference.

    So…I was delighted to read a story in today’s New York Times headlined “Online Chat, As Inspired By Real Chat” in which Brad Stone nails the shortcomings of typical social networking. “It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator,” Stone writes. The story describes how several Silicon Valley companies are bringing “live socializing” to social networking. One company, Vivaty, lets users add 3-D virtual chat rooms to Web pages and social networking sites. Vivaty Scenes offers an immersive experience in which users choose avatars to represent them.  Another company featured in the Times story is Meebo, which lets users add instant messaging to blogs, Web sites and social networking pages.

    Real-time and asynchronous collaboration are no longer divorced modeds. This means that real-time collaboration will occur more easily, more often and more spontaneously. This impacts our collective culture in that we’ll be interacting more in real time through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Within the enterprise, we can read somebody’s personal page or a team site and from there connect with people on the fly to resolve issues or make a decision. Nevertheless, improved tools are merely enablers. It takes a collaborative culture to create value through collaboration.

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