Culture

  • Instant Messaging Links TV with PC

    Gaming and business collaboration share many elements. Both link geographically-dispersed people in social networks. The business trend towards real-time, spontaneous collaboration has its roots in consumer instant messaging. It’s easier to integrate tools into our work styles that we already use in our lifestyles.  IM, which is currently becoming an IT-sanctioned enterprise tool, is taking off in workplaces because we are comfortable text chatting with family and friends.

    Microsoft, which is focused on both business and consumer collaboration, is enhancing social networks by bringing Windows Live Messenger to Xbox 360 game consoles. This announcement flings open the door so that Xbox users can interact with PC-based IM users, further linking the PC and TV platforms. Also, Windows Live Messenger users will see at a glance whether their friends have gamertags and therefore whether they’re available for gaming.

    Windows Live Messenger, the largest IM community, includes over 260 million active accounts. Xbox users can already engage in text messaging plus voice and video chat within the Xbox community. Later this year, published reports suggest that Microsoft will offer voice interaction between Xbox and PC-based Live Messenger users. This parallels the Microsoft Business Division’s moves (see my March 7 post) to enable text, voice and video chat from Microsoft Office and other applications.

    Ultimately, the relationships gamers develop may carry over into the workplace. Teenagers who bond because of common interests and form social networks using text, voice and video chat may nurture these relationships for years. Today’s consumer collaboration is tomorrow’s business collaboration.

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  • Mirror Zones for Collaboration

    Mirror zones are time zones that are opposite or nearly opposite. It’s a term I coined in The Culture of Collaboration book. The term has much relevance for collaboration.

    Using mirror zones, companies can compress product cycle time and time-to-market by creating a near 24-hour product development and design environment. When team members in one time zone sleep, their colleagues in the mirror zone work. Collaboration between the mirror zones happens in real time during the shift overlap and asynchronously the rest of the time. Mirror zones can create value in industries including aerospace, automotive, consumer products, healthcare, pharmaceutical, digital effects, advertising and many others.

    In the book, I write about how Boeing is successfully using mirror zones to design the 787 Dreamliner. I also write about how BMW leveraged time zones and set up mirror organizations when engineers were designing the X5. Beyond manufacturing, mirror zones can create substantial value in the service sector.

    Collaboration tools—both real time and asynchronous—are key enablers of mirror zones. But it takes more than tools for mirror zones to work. Bridging cultures is key.

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  • IndustryWeek Features The Culture of Collaboration

    IndustryWeek, which provides excellent targeted content to the manufacturing sector, is featuring The Culture of Collaboration book this week. Besides the author Q&A that appears on its web site, IndustryWeek is pushing the content to more than 30,000 email newsletter subscribers. I appreciate IndustryWeek’s interest in the book and the topic.

    The Q&A gave me an opportunity to hit on some of the book’s central themes including the shift to real-time collaboration and the move away from the pass-along approach to work and decision-making. IndustryWeek asked me about Six Sigma’s role in collaboration and how to build trust among multicultural collaborators. And I used The Dow Chemical Company as an example of how Six Sigma has enhanced the collaborative culture. I also described how Dow uses tools to extend—rather than create—its collaborative culture.

    Dow uses over 300 collaborative rooms called iRooms. These rooms link Dow people in forty-three countries via an IP network carrying video, voice and data. The iRooms provide a range of capabilities including Polycom videoconferencing, audio conferencing, shared digital whiteboard and application sharing. But the point I make in the Q&A—and in the book—is that an organization’s culture must become collaborative before tools can make a big difference.

    The IndustryWeek Q&A also describes how BMW and Boeing build trust among multicultural collaborators.

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  • Collaboration’s Sullied Past

    I’ve been fielding lots of calls this month from HR people who are working on realigning their organizational cultures around collaboration. Collaboration is suddenly the initiative du jour. Seizing on this trend, many marketers are positioning products as collaboration solutions. These products range from copying machines to furniture.

    But collaboration wasn’t always a good word. In The United States during World War II, the word meant conspiring with the Nazis. Edwin Black has written a fascinating investigative series for The Jewish Telegraphic Agency called “Hitler’s Carmaker.” The series (registration required) describes the alleged relationship between General Motors and the Third Reich. The words collaboration, collaborate and collaborator appear repeatedly in the series and in spin-off articles that Black has written, namely the one in the January 7, 2007 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle illustrated with an iron cross with the words “GM: Collaboration with Germany was Pervasive—and Persistent.” Clearly, the connotation of collaboration in these stories is different from the word’s current meaning.

    While the skeletons of collaboration’s past periodically fall out of the closet, the new positive consciousness for collaboration is significantly impacting business and society. Manufacturers are slashing time-to-market. Scientists are developing disease cures in record time. And through the use of collaborative processes and tools, we can come together in real time to solve problems and make decisions.

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