Concepts

  • Too Old to Collaborate?

    I was recently briefing senior leaders of a large global enterprise that wants to become more collaborative. They described a common observation: some younger team members are far more collaborative than their older colleagues. The age question constantly comes up—either directly or indirectly—whether I’m briefing senior leaders, working in the trenches of organizations, or speaking to groups. So, it’s time to devote some of this space to exploring age and collaboration.

    Collaboration is by no means new. However, broad consciousness for collaboration and effective tools to support collaborative culture are relatively recent. Collaboration has been a critical success factor for centuries in everything from fighting wars to writing songs. Also, some venerable organizations were built with a collaborative culture from the ground up. The Mayo Clinic is a great example. At the turn of the last century, Mayo was more collaborative than most companies are today. For the first decade, the Mayo brothers performed surgery together, each doctor trading off as the other’s first assistant. The Mayos assembled a cross-functional team of doctors, laboratory experts, business people and communications specialists.

    Since collaboration has been around for awhile, clearly there are plenty of older people who get collaboration. As a society, we must be careful in using the initiative du jour—whether it’s collaboration or something else—to divide people based on age. After all, how collaborative is that? Rather than using collaboration as an excuse to put older workers out to pasture, many organizations should consider how collaboration can unite generations of team members by breaking down barriers.

    Many of the perceptions that older people don’t collaborate have more to do with tools than collaboration per se. People in their 20’s often prefer the immediacy of instant messaging over the relative formality of email, while many people in their 40’s have perceived IM as more of a “communicate with the kids” tool. Their perception is evolving, however, and many are embracing presence-enabled tools including IM, web conferencing and videoconferencing as ways to reach people across functions and regions, collaborate on the fly, and get things done.

    There is also a perception that people in their 20’s know instinctively how to collaborate. This notion is often based on the perceived comfort level of younger people with collaborative tools. However, the assumption may preclude younger people from getting necessary training and participating in a culture shift towards collaboration.

    Age is by no means the most significant obstacle to collaboration in organizations. Some larger issues are internal competition, star culture and unnecessary manifestations of hierarchy. And there are people who unnecessarily compete with colleagues across the age spectrum.

    Focusing on age may short circuit collaboration initiatives by ostracizing older team members—people with knowledge, skills and perspective that cross-functional teams require. If we perceive that older team members are resisting collaborative culture, we must first analyze if the issue is collaboration itself or using collaboration tools. These issues involve different remedies, rewards and training approaches to help people, regardless of age, become more collaborative.

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  • Sustainability Fuels Collaboration Consciousness

    Both academia and business are realizing that the lack of collaboration can impede progress. Traditionally, university researchers compete for limited grant money, so there is little incentive to collaborate.

    In a Christmas day story in The New York Times, Claudia H. Deutsch reported on several academic sustainability centers that focus on collaborating across disciplines. One is the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The article quotes Nabil Nasr, the institute’s director, as saying “the problem of sustainability cuts across economics, social elements, engineering, everything. It simply cannot be solved by one discipline, or even by coupling two disciplines.” Well said!

    Now The Dow Chemical Company, through its foundation, is funding a Sustainable Products and Solutions Program at The Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business at The University of California-Berkeley. Dow is providing $10 million over the next five years and sending a Dow leader to Berkeley as an executive-in-residence. Part of his role is to recruit other industry partners to fund the program. What’s compelling about the sustainability program is that the Department of Chemistry is collaborating with the business school and the program will likely involve students and faculty from other disciplines. The bottom line is that environmental and sustainability concerns run deep enough and are so complex that they’re sparking collaboration among people who would otherwise do one of three things: compete with each other, ignore one another, or remain at odds with each other.

    Urgency in the environmental realm is clearly driving collaboration across disciplines, but sustainability is by no means the only area in which universities and corporations should be applying collaborative principles, practices and processes. In the business realm…marketing should be collaborating with research and development, R&D should be collaborating with information technology, sales should be collaborating with the market research group, and so on. This should be happening asynchronously and in real time.

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  • Reputation and Collaboration

    I was having dinner with some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley recently, and social commerce was on everybody’s mind. We discussed different business models and the prospects of some startups. Eventually, the conversation turned to blogging and, specifically, to why people blog.

    At the top of the list is reputation. Pundits blog to build their visibility and ownership of a topic. CEO’s blog to build their reputations with team members, investors and customers. People at all levels of organizations blog to establish their expertise. Marketers use blogs to enhance the reputation of brands.

    Within enterprises, blogging is becoming a knowledge and content management solution. Ideas can be captured, retained and repurposed. At its best, blogging is a collaborative rather than a solo pursuit. Collaborators can blog about each other’s posts or leave comments on the original posts. And team reputation can be a motivator for collaborative blogging.

    Just as reputation is important for bloggers, reputation also plays a role more broadly in collaborative culture. Trust is one of the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in The Culture of Collaboration book, and reputation plays a big role in trust. Reputation is based on work style, knowledge, team contributions, and integrity, among other factors. It’s becoming easier to connect and collaborate with people based on their reputations. As we establish our expertise and interests through blogging, vlogs, team sites, mashups, wikis, social networking sites and other modes, we can more easily collaborate and create value.

    Reputation also plays a role in real-time, spontaneous collaboration. Using presence (see my March 7, 2007 post), we can connect in real-time via IM, audio or video with people reputed to have relevant skills, knowledge and expertise. Every organization has internal experts on everything from purchasing to intellectual property. Increasingly, their reputations are based on contributions through wikis, team sites, blogs and meetings (which can be captured, retained, indexed and searched based on keyword). Presence lets us see their availability status and connect with these experts on the fly to solve mission-critical issues and make faster, better decisions.

    Yale Law School’s Information Society Project is tackling reputation issues in its upcoming “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace.” The conference, scheduled for December 8, 2007 in New Haven, will explore the shift towards the “wisdom of the crowd” and away from such traditional forms of reputation as educational background, institutional affiliations, and traditional business networks. Undoubtedly, this shift has wide-ranging implications for society. But the change in how we view reputation also impacts gatekeepers of every kind: publishers, studios, traditional media and elite universities and institutions. If reputation is based more on what we write, say and do online and less on affiliations, gatekeepers will play less of a role.

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  • Overcoming Fear of Failure Enhances Collaboration

    Zane Safrit, the highly-collaborative CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, has added substantially to the conversation about how accepting and learning from failure enhances collaboration. Zane_safrit Incidentally, Zane is a living, breathing example of a CEO who leverages collaborative culture and tools to create value.

    Conference Calls Unlimited has integrated many collaborative tools into its culture. Using the basecamp Wiki product from 37 Signals, Zane notes, helps eliminate backdoor channels of conversation and decisions at Conference Calls Unlimited. But minimizing fear of failure is more about the culture Zane has helped instill than it is about the tool per se. Rather than trying to hide mistakes, team members feel comfortable sharing work and ideas for all to see. Some ideas work and a few fail, but everybody keeps learning and collaborating; and the company benefits from the cultural acceptance that it’s ok to fail. Zane and his team avoid using the word mistake and instead focus on learning and collaborative accomplishments. And the result is that Conference Calls Unlimited, Zane feels, makes fewer mistakes because of the collaborative culture and environment. You can read Zane’s post here.

    Meantime, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch are searching for CEO replacements in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. The problem, according to a story (subscription required) by Aaron Lucchetti and Monica Langley in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, is that these firms suffer from a thin talent pool. It seems that the lack of internal CEO candidates stems from a Wall Street culture that is so focused on quarterly returns that leaders quickly lose their jobs if they fail to deliver.

    Something else that’s at play on Wall Street is the star cultures that plague many firms. An individual must perform as a star analyst, star trader, or a star executive. If he or she fails, the company is quick to sack the individual. Trust is out the window, and the organization—as we’re now seeing—suffers. This kind of culture gives rise to scandals including numbers fudging. Enron, which had a star culture, comes to mind. In collaborative cultures, team members brainstorm, make mistakes, chalk up successes, and often create far more value for the organization. Overcoming the fear of failing advances collaborative culture and can deliver significant returns.

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  • Collaboration Roundup: CEO private lives, Google collaboration, and Adobe CS3

    I’ve been on the road speaking on The Culture of Collaboration a lot recently. Meantime, material for this blog has been piling up, so I’ll share a few items:

    There was a fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal on September 5 headlined “Scholars Link Success of Firms to Lives of CEOs” by Mark Maremont. You can read the story for free here. The story describes new research involving how the personal lives of CEOs may impact stock prices of their companies. The theory is that a family death or a recent large house purchase are distractions that negatively affect shareholder value.

    Among the studies the story mentions is one by two Penn State professors called “It’s All About Me” which is to be published in Administrative Science Quarterly. The study concludes that narcissistic executives take greater risks, leading to bigger swings in profitability of their companies. You can read the paper by Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick here.

    The Wall Street Journal story hints that a CEO-centric star culture drives many companies. This is shortsighted leadership. It’s no surprise that narcissistic executives expose their companies to uncalculated risks. Too often, star cultures breed shoot-from-the-hip leadership rather than consensus building through broad input. As companies adopt more collaborative cultures, swagger and narcissism become less appropriate and one leader’s distractions are less likely to jeopardize the company.

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    Google Docs let people collaborate on documents screen-to-screen. I’ve been checking out the tool recently. The drawback is that it’s not quite real time, but the potential is huge. Google hosts your documents for free, and you and your colleagues can log in and access them from anywhere.

    Google has just enhanced the service with the ability to create and collaborate on presentations from anywhere. The capability stems in part from Google’s acquisition in April, 2007 of Tonic Systems. For more on this, check out Clint Boulton’s September 18 story in eWeek headlined “Google Offers ‘Collaboration in the Cloud.’”

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    I’ve been meaning to write more about Adobe and its tools. Core customers for such Adobe products as Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver are highly creative—and creative people are often collaborative. I’ve been checking out some of Adobe’s products recently. Acrobat Connect is the web conferencing tool that enables screen-to-screen sharing and annotating of Adobe’s other products and other applications. You can read my June 18 post about Acrobat Connect here.

    I’ve also been checking out the new Adobe Creative Suite 3, which coupled with Acrobat Connect, lends itself to collaborative design. Using CS3, geographically-dispersed designers can create vector graphics, develop web sites, edit images and layout pages collaboratively. Marketing people can collaborate with designers in real time, annotating everything from brochures to web designs.

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  • Spiders Getting Collaboration Religion?

    Are spiders becoming more collaborative? Experts are debating how and why spiders have spun a giant “web site” in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas.

    Spider_web The spiders created a “white fairyland” encompassing many trees. What perplexes experts is that spiders are not particularly collaborative creatures. Unlike other insects including bees and ants, spiders normally work alone in gathering food and building their homes.

    So what gives? One theory is that a rare social species of spider cooperated to build a large colony. Social spiders sometimes form colonies in tropical areas in the southern hemisphere, according to an expert quoted in The Dallas News. You can read the story here. Hmmm….social networking among spiders. What’s next? Spiderpedia or SlinkedIn?

    Another theory is that multiple species of spiders may have acted in concert.

    Perhaps spiders are beginning to understand the potential for collaboration. J

    One thing is clear. The web is a huge accomplishment that one spider could never have achieved working alone.

    And, yes, the giant Texas spider web is a reminder that we can create more value collaborating than competing.

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  • Interspecies Collaboration and New York Times letter

    Today The New York Times published my letter to the editor headlined “A Monkey With Good Taste.” The letter comments on the Times story on August 14 headlined “Will No Cage Hold Him? Monkey Again Escapes Zoo,” which describes the adventures of a 9-year old capuchin monkey named OliverOliver_the_monkey  who has escaped twice from the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo in Mississippi. Here’s the text of my letter:

    Image: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

    To the Editor:

    Re "Will No Cage Hold Him? Monkey Again Escapes Zoo" (news article, Aug. 14):

    Oliver, the 9-year-old capuchin monkey who has escaped twice from the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo in Mississippi, may be sending his captors a message about diet — and we’d all do well to take notice.

    Kirk Nemechek, the zoo manager, reportedly tried luring Oliver with "chips, candy, Fruit Loops, anything." However, Oliver was spotted looting a vegetable garden. Clearly, the monkey has more sensible food preferences than his human captors. It’s a reminder that the best ideas often come from beyond the usual sources.

    Evan Rosen, San Francisco, Aug. 15, 2007

    The last line ties in with The Culture of Collaboration. Great ideas come from all kinds of sources. For a collaborative culture to flourish, people on the front lines or the factory floor must feel comfortable contributing to key decisions. Too often, however, organizations become mired in silo syndrome, as I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book. The syndrome is that sales people rarely interact with marketing folks, marketing rarely works with R&D, and facilities almost never deals with public affairs, and so on.  

    Effective organizations ensure that decisions reflect broad input regardless of department, level, region, business unit, function—and, as Oliver the Mississippi monkey has taught us, species. J

    For more on Oliver and his fight for freedom, check out this excellent post on the blog called Baudrillard’s Bastard.

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  • Hierarchy Busters Enable Collaboration

    Hierarchy is a huge impediment to collaboration. In organizational cultures that emphasize hierarchy, people feel compelled to go through channels. This prevents front-line people from contributing to decisions and also discourages leaders from getting real-time, unfiltered information from the field. Smart organizations encourage collaboration across levels, functions, business units and regions.

    I was glad to read in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that SK Telecom of Korea has taken fundamental steps to reduce the role of hierarchy. Evan Ramstad writes in his "Managing" column headlined “Pulling Rank Gets Harder At One Korean Company” that SK Telecom has replaced the five ranks that employees used to address each other with one rank, manager. You can read the article here (reg. required).

    I live in California, where people in business typically call each other by their first names. For somebody to call his or her boss “Director Jones” would seem absurd. But even in Silicon Valley companies with supposedly reduced hierarchies and relaxed environments, trappings of position exist such as triple-sized cubicles. In other regions, hierarchy is more pronounced. People address senior leaders as “Mr. or “Ms.” and they talk of vice presidents in hushed tones as if they might get in trouble for even uttering the names of big shots.

    As growth has slowed, SK Telecom has begun encouraging more debate and input from all levels. The idea is to spark more creativity and risk-taking, which are certainly important to collaborating. South Korea’s business culture has traditionally concentrated decision-making with senior executives “to protect their power” as Ramstad notes. Clearly, SK Telecom has realized that, in Bob Dylan’s words, the times they are a-changin’ and that a hierarchical culture was costing the company money.

    Other companies should take notice that reducing the role of hierarchy and instilling the culture of collaboration is in vogue—and will create value.

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  • Collaboration and Star Culture

    Collaboration requires collaborative culture. That’s the whole point of this blog. The opposite of collaborative culture is star culture, which our collective culture—particularly in the United States—perpetuates. The media is certainly complicit, because celebrity stories draw audiences. Therefore, the media has a vested interest in manufacturing stars—not just Hollywood people, but business leaders, athletes, entrepreneurs, surgeons, chefs and others. Food writers are particularly culpable, and we’ve certainly seen the celebrity craze spread to winemakers.

    Now, apparently, star culture is trying to envelop tequila makers. Last Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a short article by Camper English headlined “Next big thing: Tequila bottle signings.” You can read the article here. The story begins, “Further evidence that distillers are the new rock stars…” We learn from the article that Carlos Camarena, owner and third-generation master distiller of El Tesoro Tequila, will be in San Francisco to sign autographs on $185 bottles of tequila at a liquor store.

    Clearly, Mr. Camarena is not alone in contributing to the success of El Tesoro. According to El Tesoro’s web site, making tequila begins with the jimador, the person who hand picks perfectly-ripe agaves and separates the pina, the juicy blue core, from the rest of the plant. “Most other tequila producers use an automated system that processes the entire stem,” the web site notes. Next workers cut the pinas into quarters with a special ax. In the next stage, workers use the traditional method of baking the pina quarters for 36 hours and cooling them for another 36 hours. Next workers use a one-ton stone wheel called a tahona to crush the pinas, extracting their juices. There are three more steps.

    The point is that many people with a variety of expertise collaborate to make El Tesoro tequila. While I appreciate the marketing benefits of Mr. Camarena signing tequila bottles during his rock star-style tour, this feeds into star culture and sends the wrong message to the public and to El Tesoro team members. Promoting the CEO as a star may produce a momentary marketing bounce, but a collaborative culture sustains greater business value than a star culture.

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  • Networking and Collaboration

    Networking with people who share your interests is often the first step to effective cross-organizational collaboration, but staying in touch with people after conferences and trade shows is by no means automatic. The first step is a system that makes contacting people easy. I have blogged extensively about presence, which is the ability of a person or device to communicate with others and display levels of availability. IM has introduced us to presence. But what about people we meet at conferences whose information is on business cards rather than in a database? Echoing the classic 1995 book Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, it’s a challenge of turning atoms into usable bits.

    I attend many conferences, and I usually end up with a pocket full of business cards, some with notes on the back about conversations and follow-up items. While I make and receive calls and exchange email with some of these contacts, I rarely find the time to manually enter the information from every business card into my contact database. There is, however, an effective solution.

    Cardscan_team_with_laptop_reduced_c

    I’ve been using an incredibly-useful product that automates business card data entry. CardScan Team combines simple and intuitive contact management software and a sleek business card scanner with the ability to share the database with colleagues on a network. I scanned a stack of cards, one after the next, and processed the pile in a couple of minutes. CardScan Team efficiently recognized name, email, phone numbers, fax, address, URL and other information and placed it in the right fields instantly. The software is smart enough to know that there are many ways people indicate phone numbers on cards including “p” or “tel.”

    I assigned a customized category with the name of the conference so that I could easily query the database for all of the contacts I met at that venue. CardScan Team displays the front of each business card and provides the option of scanning the back. The software also enables users to export the data to Microsoft Outlook. CardScan Team had trouble with only one card in my stack that displayed some fiery red text, but the software let me easily make a couple of quick changes to the data. CardScan Team, which costs $399.99, synchronizes with mobile devices. The product also includes secure data back-up and password-protected access to that data via a browser.

    CardScan Team enhances collaboration by letting us share contact information with colleagues in real time and by dramatically decreasing the time and hassle factor involved in keeping in touch.

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