Product Development

  • Unlocking Collaboration through Deserialization

    Why does collaboration fail? The answer is often the lack of collaborative processes and culture. Less obvious is the lack of deserialization. From the private sector to education and from government to nonprofits, serialized processes impede collaboration.

    Deserialization is both macro and micro. As I describe in the new, expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book, macro deserialization is the removal of sequences from the lifecycle of products and services. There are useful manifestations in multiple industries. In the aerospace industry, macro deserialization means simultaneously designing parts, plans, tools, processes, assembly, delivery, maintenance, and retirement of the plane. In the visual effects industry, post-production is becoming pre-production as artists design effects before and during the shoot with hybrid physical and virtual worlds.

    Micro deserialization is the removal of sequences from how we interact and get things done. The in-box culture is dead—and the in-box can include overflowing text, chat and messaging applications. Waiting for somebody else to provide input slows decisions and complicates resolution. So does making an appointment to collaborate! Instead, Do It Now Together! And instead of scheduling a meeting, let’s engage each other spontaneously in a collaborative group session—No Appointment Necessary. You’ll find more on replacing meetings in the book.

    Embracing deserialization unlocks the value that collaboration promises.

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  • New Expanded and Updated Edition of The Culture of Collaboration® Book

    How has collaboration evolved? What is the current state of collaboration at Toyota, Mayo Clinic, Industrial Light & Magic, Boeing and other companies profiled in the first edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book? What are the keys to long-term value creation through collaboration?

    These are questions I sought to answer as I went back inside collaborative companies to research and write the new, expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book.

    Jacket with border CofC EU

    The expanded and updated edition has just been released, and I’m proud of the finished work. The 363-page business book includes 54 images and illustrations and a beefy index. By the way, 54 images and illustrations is no easy feat in 2024. Ever wonder why most business books lack pictures? It’s time-consuming to license even a single image from a large organization.

    One thing I’ve learned is that deserialization and collaboration go together like peanut butter and jelly. Deserialization means removing sequences from the lifecycle of products and services. The idea is to collapse outmoded sequential approaches and replace them with spontaneous, real-time processes.

    Deserialization also involves removing sequences from interaction. This means killing what’s left of the in-box culture. In short, deserialization is the key to long-term value creation through collaboration. That’s why the subtitle of the expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® is: Deserializing Time, Talent and Tools to create Value in the Local and Global Economy.

    I’ve also learned that despite best efforts, collaboration can stall within highly-collaborative organizations. Paradoxically, collaboration happens in companies in which the dominant culture is command and control. Likewise, internal competition and command and control exist in mostly-collaborative organizations. Many factors, as I explain in the expanded and updated edition, influence both the evolution and regression of The Culture of Collaboration.

    More broadly… as I write in the preface, in some ways we’re less collaborative than we were in the early 2000s. Social media lets us broadcast opinions without refining ideas through real-time interaction. We join groups that make rules for how we should think. Videoconferencing enables interaction at a distance, but too often we’re wasting time in scheduled virtual meetings rather than creating value together spontaneously. While in the same room, we meet rather than collaborate. We leave meetings to work and then schedule follow-up meetings to review work. This serial process zaps value.

    My objective in revisiting this topic is to consider whether we have evolved or veered off track and to provide a new framework for unblocking collaboration and unlocking value.

    Let me know your thoughts about the new, expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book.

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  • Trust, Transparency and Collaborating with Partners (or App Users)

            My college housemate, an early and frequent Facebook user, recently announced that he’s pulling the plug on his Facebook account. This decision is apparently based on the perception that Facebook has deceived users about how it shares and profits from personal data. Facebook users are essentially its business partners.

            Meantime, the City and County of Los Angeles is suing the business unit of IBM that includes the Weather Channel app. According to the complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the IBM unit has “deceptively used its users’ private, personal geolocation data.” The app reportedly has 45 million users monthly.

            The tide is turning against social media services and various apps that fail to adequately protect user’s data and privacy. Both Facebook and the IBM weather unit also serve business customers. “We want to be the place where work happens,” Facebook VP of Workplace Julien Cordorniou has reportedly told ZDNet. In an interview on Weather.com, Michael Rodriguez, head of mobile apps for The Weather Company, an IBM Business, says “the app has your back.”

             These pronouncements sound great but fall flat. The problem is deterioration of trust. Trust is one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that are critical to collaboration. I identify these in The Culture of Collaboration book. Both Facebook and the Weather Company are essentially asking us to trust them with our data so that we can collaborate with other users and with the companies themselves.

              Sneaky language, allegedly deceptive practices and hidden agendas destroy trust and therefore inhibit collaboration. Say a firm wants to collaborate with a business partner. Before partnering companies can effectively collaborate, they must establish the rules of engagement which, among other things, spell out the ownership and use of jointly-created intellectual property. If one partner has a hidden agenda, what are the chances trust will flourish and the collaboration will create value? Practically zero.

              Similarly, when we input data into social media and other apps, we are essentially partnering with the app owner. When the word gets out about allegedly deceptive practices and sneaky language in the terms of service, which is the contract between vendor and user, hidden agendas are no longer hidden. Trust vanishes and with it collaboration. Instead of creating value through collaboration, the deception costs a company plenty in reputation, litigation and revenue.

               Because only the vendor writes the rules of engagement or terms of service, there can be no real collaboration or partnering with the user. While negotiating the terms with each user is impossible, companies would do well to seek input into privacy guidelines and other terms from, say, a panel of user representatives. Then something closer to collaboration with user/partners could occur.

               If Facebook had not lost the trust of many users, my college housemate would undoubtedly continue to partner with Facebook by inputting his data. Companies seeking to truly collaborate with customers and business partners seek clarity and transparency.

     

     

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  • Daimler Collaborates to Reinvent Trucks

    Karl Benz is often credited with inventing the first true car. In 1885, Benz built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen powered by an internal combustion gasoline engine.

    Did he act alone? Of course not. We collaborators know that nobody achieves great feats by themselves. Karl Benz had help. One collaborator was his wife, Bertha, who funded the project and took a later version of the Benz on its first long-distance journey. Benz’s company eventually merged with Daimler Motoren Gesselschaft.

    Now the company that invented the automobile is collaborating to reinvent the truck.  At the Tokyo Auto Show last Wednesday, Daimler announced a purely electric truck and bus brand called E-FUSO and pledged to electrify all vehicles produced by Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation subsidiary. 

    Some hours later at the Mercedes-Benz Research and Development Center in Silicon Valley, journalists gathered for a briefing.  Before the event, Daimler leaders and I had a far-reaching discussion about how Daimler collaborates internally and with partners and governments. We also discussed how electric trucks and buses will change life particularly for those of us who live in cities.

    Daimler Fuso’s e-Canter all-electric light truck. Image copyright Daimler. All rights reserved.

    Daimler’s Fuso is currently selling the eCanter light truck which it assembles in Portugal for the North American market. 7-Eleven in Japan and UPS in Atlanta are using the eCanter which has a range of 60 miles between battery charges. The optimal use of the eCanter is for deliveries within cities.

    “We want to make the cities a better place to live. We want the world to change to the next level,” explained an energetic Marc Llistosella, president and CEO of Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation. Marc, who is anything but a staid leader, was animated and clearly comfortable climbing aboard the concept E-Fuso Vision One truck and giving us a live tour via real-time, interactive video.  The concept truck, which is several years from production, has a 220-mile range between battery charges and carries a payload of eleven tons. This would enable metro and regional delivery routes.

    Benoit Tallec, head of design for Mitsubishi Fuso, noted that a central touch display replaces dials and switches on the Vision One so that the driver focuses on the road. He compared the evolution of Fuso trucks to the evolution of boats from sail to steam power in the early 19th Century. Fuso’s technological advances are “the result of a team effort across three continents,” he said.

    Daimler FUSO’s Vision One concept all-electric truck. Image copyright Daimler. All rights reserved.

    After the discussion and presentation, I hopped aboard the eCanter and drove the quietly-purring vehicle by some of Sunnyvale’s

    technology company parking lots as some curious engineers took notice.

    Daimler’s E-FUSO unit faces two big challenges: infrastructure for charging trucks and increasing battery range. Overcoming these challenges could one day make electric trucks economically viable for longer routes. While consumers may buy electric cars as much for novelty as economics, truck customers demand a business case that proves electric vehicles create value.  Making that case through technology advances and cost reduction will require continued collaboration within Daimler, with business partners and with governments.

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  • 7 Success Factors for Collaboration Hackathons

    The hackathon has gone mainstream.

    Once a method used primarily by coders, the hackathon has moved beyond the boundaries of software development. From government agencies and universities to start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, organizations are embracing collaboration hackathons or what we might call collabathons to spark innovation, develop products and services, and improve processes for everything from quality control to recognition and reward.

    Collaboration hackathons inspire team members to step away from their day-to-day roles and solve a big problem or brainstorm a new direction with a tangible take-away.  The structure of a successful collaboration hackathon mirrors that of a collaborative organization. We’re talking about an ad hoc team that forms for a specific purpose, collaborates, and then disbands. The 7 Success Factors for Collaboration Hackathons mirror the 7 steps in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration. These are:

    1) Plan

    2) People

    3) Principles

    4) Practices

    5) Processes

    6) Planet

    7) Payoff

    In the context of collaboration hackathons:

    Plan is a problem to be solved, product/service to be developed, process to be created or improved or key question to be answered

    People means broad participation in cross-functional collaboration hackathons regardless of level, role or region

    Principles are the collaboration hackathon’s value system, the guidelines in solving the problem

    Practices put principles into action through everything from a physical environment that fosters brainstorming to tools for capturing and refining ideas and putting them into action. Practices ensure that the hackathon is a collaborative group session (CGS) rather than a meeting.

    Processes let hackers rapidly prototype and test ideas.

    Planet puts communities in the center of the hackathons and inspires hackers to address how their ideas impact the communities in which the organization does business. The Planet step may consider everything from carbon footprint to privacy.

    Payoff is the work product of the hackathon which must create value

    These 7 steps prevent collaboration hackathons or collabathons from degenerating into meandering “bull sessions” at one extreme or turning into formal meetings at the opposite extreme. With The Bounty Effect’s 7 Steps, collaboration hackathons or collabathons succeed in solving big problems, answering key questions, developing products and services, improving processes, refining ideas and putting concepts into action.

    Collabathons can help shift the structure of the entire organization from competitive, command-and-control to collaborative. The possibilities are endless.

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  • Collaboration Creates Leap in Photo Organizing

    Inheriting shoe boxes full of photos presents challenges. You can leave them in the garage or attic gathering dust. You can argue with siblings about who keeps the photos, who scans them, and who shares them electronically with everybody else. You can hire a professional photo organizer. Or you can collaborate with professionals and incorporate their techniques into your system.

    That’s what Epson has done. And that collaboration has helped produce the FastFoto FF-640 photo scanning system which Epson is

    Epson FF-640
    The Epson FastFoto FF-640 scans and organizes photos. It’s the result of collaboration.

    releasing today. The system combines what Epson says is a one-photo-per-second photo scanner with image organizing software. Epson’s Jack Rieger demonstrated the system a couple of weeks ago during a pre-launch briefing at San Francisco’s Le Meridien hotel. Rieger described Epson’s collaboration with the Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO). “We took the best of their techniques and embedded them in software,” explained Rieger, a chemical engineer and former film designer and digital product marketer for Kodak. These techniques include file structure and hierarchy for automated sorting of photos, a file naming system, a capture date that reflects the date the photo was taken, and searchable metadata which is the data about the data.

    According to the Association of Personal Photo Organizers, 1.7 trillion printed photos “languish in boxes and containers.”  Each month, people take another 10 billion pictures globally resulting in what the association calls “photo chaos.” APPO says it equips its more than 500 members who are independent professionals to “rescue” and organize all these photos.  Now APPO has a new tool color in its palette of organizing tools.

    “This is groundbreaking, something that was not possible before,” Rieger insisted. The scanner features a 30-photo auto feeder and scans the front and back of the photo to preserve any writing on the back. The software automatically restores and corrects the color of old photos. Plus the system ties in with frequently-used services including Facebook, Dropbox and Google Drive to enable collaboration among friends and family. So the sibling who inherits the photos can more easily digitize, organize, and share the anthology and collaborate on the collection with other siblings, relatives and friends.

    Tools and technologies never create collaboration, but they can enhance and extend collaboration. This is true whether we’re developing a slide show with siblings or producing a product with colleagues. And the Epson FastFoto FF-640, a product developed through collaboration, also enhances collaboration among its users.

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