Current Affairs

  • Ford Keeping Volvo: Collaboration a Factor?

    Collaboration was percolating beneath the surface of Ford Motor Company’s announcement last Thursday that it would focus on fixing rather than selling Volvo. I argued in an August 3 post entitled “Why Ford Should Keep Volvo” that the greatest value Ford stands to gain by keeping Volvo is the Culture of Collaboration. You can read my post here.

    In the announcement, Ford said that it has developed a plan for Volvo. The priority is to improve the unit’s financial performance, which has been stymied by several factors including foreign exchange rates. Another objective is to increase “synergies” (essentially collaboration) between Ford-brand operations and Volvo, particularly in product development and purchasing.

    In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about highly-collaborative enterprises. Ford is included mostly because of Volvo. While Ford’s collaborative culture is a work in progress, Volvo collaborates constantly and is consensus-driven. In short, Ford has much to learn from Volvo on many levels. Clearly, Ford CEO Alan Mulally wants to accelerate collaboration between Ford and Volvo. Until recently, Alan ran Boeing Commercial Airplanes—and Boeing is among the most collaborative companies. My sense is that Alan is the right leader at the right time for Ford. He understands the value collaboration can create. Clearly, the desire to collaborate with Volvo is playing a role in Ford’s decision to keep the unit.

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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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  • Bill Gates, Jeff Raikes and Collaboration Microsoft-Style

    “The PBX is almost like the mainframe was,” Bill Gates told customers and business partners yesterday at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Gates was referring to the private branch exchange, the device that links businesses to the public switched telephone network. Gates added that the shift from the public switched telephone network to unified communications over Internet protocol is “as profound as the shift from typewriters to word processing software.” Later, Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, insisted that unified communications will transform business communications as much as email did in the 1990’s.

    Gates_and_raikes

    Gates and Raikes were speaking at a launch event for a suite of communication and collaboration products: Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Roundtable. Microsoft Office Communications Server makes multiple collaboration and communication modes available right from business productivity applications. Collaborators can see instantly which colleagues are available and can connect on the fly through instant messaging, voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing. This capability is called presence. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 is the client software, while Microsoft Office Live Meeting is the latest version of Microsoft’s web conferencing software.

    Roundtable_2

    RoundTable (see image) is a table-top video and audio communications system that provides a 360-degree view of meeting participants plus tracks the speaker. The most compelling aspect of RoundTable is the ability to capture meeting audio and video and review key portions later.

    Microsoft and fifty partners participated in the event. And although “unified communications” is the label these companies are using for the new, merged approach to communications, this effort is as much about enhancing collaboration as about communication. And, in fact, Microsoft customers appearing in a video shown during the event and futurists presenting on Microsoft panels later in the day repeatedly referred to improved collaboration.

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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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  • Why Ford Should Keep Volvo

    As Ford Motor Company refocuses on its core brand and operations, media reports indicate that the company wants to offload Jaguar and Land Rover and may be willing to sell Volvo Cars. These brands comprise Ford’s premier automotive group. For the record, Ford has denied that Volvo is on the block.

    Clearly, Ford faces challenges. So far in 2007, Ford’s sales are down more than 12 percent over the same period last year. And Ford has reportedly received initial bids for Jaguar and Land Rover. While Jaguar and Land Rover have been losing money, Volvo is another story. Volvo has been producing profits of $800 million to $1 billion per year, according to a July 17 story in The New York Times headlined “Ford Seeking a Future By Going Backward.” You can read the story here (registration required).

    But Volvo’s value to Ford goes beyond sales and even beyond the substantial expertise in safety that the Swedish company has provided to its American parent. The greatest value Ford stands to gain from keeping Volvo is the culture of collaboration. Volvo has a highly-collaborative organizational culture in which hierarchy takes a back seat to results. When they feel strongly about key decisions, junior people are quick to challenge senior leaders.

    As I mention in The Culture of Collaboration book, if Volvo’s CEO were to propose a new strategy during a meeting, a junior person would feel comfortable telling him that his ideas require further discussion. Volvo people spend considerable time reviewing, negotiating and discussing until they agree. Then the team proceeds with paced discipline. Some of Volvo’s culture is rubbing off on Ford’s other operations, particularly in Europe, as Ford “commonizes” certain parts and collaborates more across brands.

    Ford, which has been stymied in part by hierarchy and lack of collaboration, should keep Volvo and make a concerted effort to apply Volvo’s collaborative principles and culture across Ford’s operations. Volvo derives its culture in part from Swedish culture which is more collaborative than the dominant culture in the United States.

    While there are already efforts to integrate more collaborative tools into work styles, Ford needs to focus at least as much on culture as on tools. Meantime, Sweden is proud of Volvo and wants it back. The Swedish newspaper, Dagens Industri, reports that Volvo insiders are trying to arrange for Swedish institutional investors to buy Volvo, should Ford want to sell the unit. You can read the translated version of the story here.

    One advantage Ford has is that Alan Mulally has taken the helm as President and CEO. Mulally understands the value of collaboration from running Boeing Commercial Airplanes. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about how Boeing has reinvented itself as a large-scale systems integrator and has shifted away from designing and building airplanes by itself. Boeing now collaborates with design and manufacturing partners to produce the 787 Dreamliner and other planes. The term I use to describe Boeing’s new approach is global collaborative enterprise. Mulally should draw from his background at Boeing and from Volvo’s example to transform Ford’s culture into a collaborative one.

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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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  • Collaboration Across Time Zones

    The blogosphere is abuzz with comments about The Daily Telegraph’s editorial that we should eliminate time zones in favor of a single “Global Time.”

    Since the Telegraph is a British newspaper, Global Time means Greenwich Mean Time. The argument in favor of Global Time is that it’s simple and that New Yorkers will get used to the alarm clock going off at what is currently 11 p.m. EDT.

    While a single time zone could solve some problems, it would undoubtedly create other issues—like choosing the time zone that would become Global Time. Another issue is that highly-collaborative companies leverage mirror zones (see my March 16 post) for 24-hour product and service design and development. Shifting to a single time zone would compromise that business model.

    The discussion about time zones points up an issue that plagues many organizations. I have worked with global companies that expect the rest of the world to adopt headquarters-driven, real-time collaboration schedules. This means team members in Paris must collaborate at night with a Seattle headquarters or a team in Tokyo must conference at 5 a.m. with headquarters in New York where it’s 4 p.m. The result is that people in other regions feel abused by the home office and can even interpret such practices as cultural insensitivity.

    The most collaborative companies reject headquarters-driven schedules. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how collaborative organizations solve time zone problems by rotating convenience among regions. This has particular relevance for scheduled videoconferences and web conferences. The convenience of spontaneous encounters should also rotate based on common sense. If one collaborator or group of collaborators stays up late one week, their counterparts across the ocean may sacrifice convenience the next week. Collaborative leaders must consider work styles and lifestyles of global team members when scheduling interactions or collaborating spontaneously.

    It’s time to BREAK OUT of a headquarters-driven collaboration schedule and mindset so that global teams can create greater value.   

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  • Education and Collaboration

    Does collaboration begin in the playground?

    New York City’s Commissioner of Parks Adrian Benepe thinks so. That’s why the city is partnering with Rockwell Group Architecture and Design to develop a prototype “Imagination Playground.” The idea is to encourage interaction, social play and collaboration. Gone are the monkey bars and seesaws, which child psychologists increasingly believe develop physical skills at the expense of social and interactive skills.

    The prototype playground at New York’s South Street Seaport is designed to “suggest options” and provide a flexible environment for many types of play, rather than prescribed activities.  The environment includes what designers call the “raw materials of creativity.” These include such items as sand and water, blocks, buckets, shovels, and a wheelbarrow. Using an idea first implemented in Europe, trained adults called play workers act as facilitators. The city expects to ultimately transform many of New York’s playgrounds into Imagination Playgrounds.

    The Imagination Playground echoes the trend in companies to create gathering spaces where people feel comfortable sharing ideas. This helps break down barriers among functions, levels and departments. This, in turn, increases collaboration. Instilling collaborative culture in the playground will likely enhance collaboration in tomorrow’s workplace.

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  • Ford and Toyota

    Collaborating with competitors may sound like a contradiction in terms.

    So why did Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally and Mark Fields, Ford’s head of operations for the Americas, meet with Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho and other top Toyota executives in Tokyo the week before Christmas? Ostensibly, the meeting was to explore environmentally-friendly technology including hybrid-electric and hydrogen fuel systems and ways that Toyota can help Ford boost manufacturing efficiency.

    Ford and Toyota have a history of both competition and collaboration. In the 1930’s, Ford allowed Toyota leaders to study its production techniques. In 1950, Toyota leaders including President Eiji Toyoda (yes, the family name is spelled with a “d”) spent a few months visiting U.S. auto plants and studying production. They were particularly interested in Ford’s Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan. Subsequently, Toyota Plant Manager Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota production system which not only includes “lean manufacturing,” but also emphasizes input from team members at all levels and functions.

    Mulally, who until September ran Boeing’s commercial airplanes business, helped implement collaborative product development and manufacturing techniques at Boeing. And besides internal collaboration, Boeing collaborates extensively with competitors. Alan Mulally is undoubtedly interested in applying his collaborative instincts at Ford.

    I wrote about Toyota, Boeing and Ford’s Premier Automotive Group in The Culture of Collaboration book. There are some similarities in how these companies collaborate, but also there are distinct differences. Smart organizations consider collaborating with competitors. The acid test of whether competitive collaboration makes sense is whether it creates value for all the collaborators.

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