The Culture of Collaboration

Community Collaboration and Recycling San Francisco Style

San Franciscans toss away at least five bicycles a day. When the mountain bike craze ebbed, that number was higher—at times, 20 bikes a day. And SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. (aka The Dump) also gets 10 to 20 pieces of exercise equipment—everything from elliptical machines to NordicTrack skiers. Each day the dump also receives about 20 plants, some of which volunteers transfer into the dump’s garden. 

 

I learned many of these statistics Saturday morning from Deborah Munk, who coordinates art and education programs for the dump. Deborah was conducting a public tour, which included a heavy dose of recycling and trash facts. I learned that China is paying top dollar for recycled paper. Every day, the San Francisco dump ships hundreds of bales of paper to China, which helps fuel the country’s growth.

 

This particular public tour was crowded with artists vying for the dump’s Artist-in-Residence program, which gives artists a stipend, a studio, a show, and access to San Francisco’s waste stream so that  they can get first dibs on materials for sculptures, paintings, videos, and other media. Paul Cesewski, former artist-in-residence, turns recycled bicycles among other items into kinetic art. Nancy Calef, who was taking Saturday’s tour before applying for the program, uses recycled objects ranging from eyeglasses to emery boards in her 3D “Peoplescapes.” Peoplescapes are sculpted characters and applied objects on canvas which juxtapose people in recognizable places and situations weaving together a story about contemporary life.  Calef also recycles canvases for a technique called “plane slashing,” which combines two or more paintings into one.

 

The artists collaborate with the recycling sorters, who look out for requested materials. One artist recently asked for some pens, and a few hours later he received hundreds of them. Those pens are now a sculpture. The artists help promote recycling, and they’re one aspect of how people throughout the dump’s ecosystem work together to create value.

 

San Francisco’s recycling program is a study in collaboration. Seventy percent of the two thousand tons of waste a day that flows into the dump is recycled. Clearly, San Franciscans take the time to sort their refuse into bins color-coded for trash, compost and recyclables. And once the waste arrives, union sorters identify items that can be sold as commodities, reusable stuff and electronic waste. The dump makes some stuff, such as recycled latex paint, available for free. Also, more than eighty thousand homes and two thousand restaurants compost their food scraps. San Franciscans get some of their compost back as free soil a couple of times a year, and wineries nourish their vines with soil made from SF compost.

 

Some dump team members are pressing to take collaboration to the next level. “We’re just scratching the surface,” insists Bob Besso, recycling manager for Norcal Waste Systems, Inc., which runs the dump. Currently, San Franciscans pay $107 a ton to dump waste. SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. sells much of the recycled waste as commodities. All that exercise equipment becomes scrap metal. Besso believes the dump should designate drop-off areas where specialists could evaluate specific categories of items such as exercise equipment and bicycles, furniture and textiles, clothing and other items. Rather than charge for accepting these reusable items, the dump could take them for free and sell them at a higher price than that of a commodity. Garbage Reincarnation, Inc, a non-profit in Santa Rosa, California has achieved success of this sort. Besso believes the San Francisco dump could become a model for large-scale reincarnation of waste.

 

SFRecycling & Disposal, Inc. comprises an ecosystem of collaborators who are striving to create greater value through innovation, education, and brainstorming. The SF Dump’s approach reminds us that rather than letting new ideas die on the vine, our challenge is to improve ideas through collective input so that we achieve awesome results.

Virtual Worlds and Cisco's Evolving Culture

As organizations adopt virtual worlds, there is growing confusion about when telepresence or videoconferencing may fit the bill and when virtual worlds make more sense.

 

Virtual worlds such as Second Life and Qwaq Forums enable geographically-dispersed colleagues to collaborate in a shared, immersive 3D environment. Qwaq is particularly suited for business. For more on Qwaq, see my September 21, 2007 post. Typically, avatars represent each collaborator and there’s audio without interactive video.

 

At the American Society of Training and Development International Conference last month in San Diego, corporate managers packed a session on using virtual worlds in the enterprise. The buzz was that virtual worlds make more sense than videoconferencing in part because people are getting more accustomed to a gaming-type experience. That supposition is debatable, because tools must fit the situation and the culture. For a performance evaluation, virtual worlds would be a poor choice of tool. Telepresence would work, if a team member is a continent away and a face-to-face meeting is impossible.

 

On Friday, I had a broad discussion with Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.  Chris, a Canadian, joined Cisco 18 months ago after serving as vice president of marketing for Netopia, which became the broadband home unit of Motorola. Our discussion ranged from virtual worlds to collaborative culture, and the conversation flowed easily and informally perhaps because Chris was relaxed and enjoying the informality of his cottage on the lake outside Toronto.

 

“If it’s a casual relationship, video is less important,” Chris noted. Such a relationship might include tech support sessions, customer service calls, and some sales calls. In such cases, virtual worlds may offer better opportunities for branding than videoconferencing. Several years ago, there were many predictions that we would soon be using interactive video for customer service calls. This has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. However, if vendors begin thinking differently about telesales and customer service and start considering these transient relationships as opportunities to build relationships over time, interactive video may be useful.

 

Regarding culture…like many people who work for companies that are adopting collaborative cultures, Chris has had to adjust. He previously embraced the command-and-control approach. However, Cisco has moved away from a competitive, authoritarian culture and has adopted a more collaborative culture in which team members from many functions and regions participate in making decisions.

 

My sense is that Cisco has made this shift for at least two reasons:

 

1) Collaboration creates greater value

 

2) Cisco sells a range of collaborative tools including unified communications and telepresence.

These tools, as I’ve written about extensively, take hold far more effectively in collaborative cultures. So, Cisco clearly wants to set an example.

 

Chris and I also talked about the merging of real-time and asynchronous tools. Cisco is now launching WebEx Connect, which provides a collaborative space through which colleagues can connect in real time through web conferencing plus collaborate after the real-time session ends. Colleagues who may have missed a web conference can search the audio and listen to key parts of a web conference after the fact. Users can also post comments about web conferences.

Making Sense of Meetings

There is certainly a distinction between collaboration and meetings. Nevertheless, one company is laser-focused on bringing efficiency to meetings through collaboration before, during and after meetings. That company is MeetingSense, which has just released version 3.0 of its hosted software.

 

“Meetings are not snapshots in time. They are an evolution of information,” according to Hannon Brett, who founded MeetingSense in 2004 with his brother, Gregg. Hannon managed strategic relationships for the Macromedia Breeze web conferencing unit before Adobe acquired Macromedia. Gregg worked in business development for IBM.

 

Hannon insists that users are saving an average of 15 minutes per meeting by using the software’s agenda wizard, meeting information capture, and meeting summary and action item capture and tracking. MeetingSense, backed by TVC Capital, has so far received $3 million in series A funding. The fee for the hosted service is $19.99 per month per user with volume discounts available.

Lodestar Gets Nearly 700 Nominations for $250K Collaboration Prize

The Lodestar Foundation has received 600 to 700 nominations for its first annual $250,000 collaboration prize. Today is the deadline, and I just got off the phone with Lois Savage, the foundation’s president. Lois tells me that the impetus for the prize is the lack of models for collaboration among non-profits. The prize process creates the opportunity to gather information about effective collaborative practice models that academics and non-profit practitioners can study.  

 

Too often in the non-profit sector, funders try to drive collaboration by forcing organizations with similar objectives and interests to work together. Lois calls them “shotgun weddings.” These usually fail. Similarly, successful collaboration in the for-profit workplace requires more than tools and an edict to collaborate.

 

The Collaboration Prize recognizes collaboration among two or more nonprofit organizations that would otherwise provide the same or similar services and compete for money, clients and staff. The Lodestar Foundation, created by real estate developer Jerry Hirsch of Phoenix, focuses on process and structure of non-profits rather than on specific philanthropic activities. Lodestar’s guiding principle is encouraging non-profits to use efficient business practices. Collaboration fits into that framework by maximizing resources and reducing competition among organizations tackling similar issues. Lodestar has funded cooperative ventures and new organizational structures including coalitions and mergers.

 

Here’s how the prize selection process works: La Piana Associates of Emeryville, California, a management consulting firm for non-profits, will review submissions for eligibility. AIM, the Arizona-Indiana-Michigan Alliance, will review nominations and select eight semi-finalists. AIM is a consortium that includes The Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation at Arizona State University, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, will chair a panel that will choose the recipients from among the finalists.

 

The Lodestar Foundation is one of a growing number of foundations that are embracing collaboration. In July of 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced 16 grants totaling $287 million to fund an international network of highly- collaborative research consortia focused on developing an HIV vaccine. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the Myelin Repair Foundation’s collaborative research model. The model creates incentives for data sharing and collaboration among scientists at different universities working on treatments for multiple sclerosis.

 

While the non-profit sector has focused recently on adopting efficient business practices, the for-profit sector may also look to non-profits for guidance. There is certainly room for knowledge transfer among both sectors to share successful collaboration models.

Collaboration Means Knowing When to Step Aside

“Do you want to be rich or do you want to be king?” That’s the question Mark Perry, general partner with New Enterprise Associates, asks founders of portfolio companies who resist being replaced. Often, venture capitalists like Mark seek to replace founding CEO’s with leaders who are more suited to take a company to the next level.

 

Collaborative leaders willingly step aside when it’s the right decision for the company. After all, many people have a stake in a company’s success including investors, employees and customers. For a founder to remain CEO because of ego and bravado can damage the company he or she has worked hard to create.  And, as Perry points out, the rewards for everybody are often greater when the founding CEO moves on at the right juncture.

 

At the 19^th Annual IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference last month in San Francisco, venture capitalists and executive search consultants debated issues including CEO succession on a panel called “Building a Management Team in 2008.” The panel included venture capitalists Mark Perry of New Enterprise Associates, Cameron Lester of Azure Capital Partners and Mark Sugarman of MHS Capital plus recruiter Aaron Lapat of J. Robert Scott. Recruiter Jeff Kuhn of FLG Partners moderated the panel.

 

The VC’s agreed that it becomes obvious over time if the CEO puts his or her own success above that of the company. This is exactly the kind of behavior smart VC’s seek to identify before they invest. Cameron Lester of Azure Capital Partners recommends asking founders the question, “If this company grew beyond you, would you be willing to step aside?”

 

Stepping aside, deferring to others, and soliciting input are among behaviors key to collaborative organizations of all sizes.  When we use collaborative tools including web conferencing, it’s important to relinquish control and let colleagues take the cursor while sharing applications. In a broader sense, collaborative people understand how their expertise contributes to collaborative work and know instinctively when to defer to those with complimentary skills.

 

Challenges for collaborative leaders include resisting the control paradigm and inviting input from all levels and functions.  Then it’s easier to recognize when changing roles, relinquishing authority, or even leaving the organization benefits the company. The acid test is whether stepping aside creates organizational value.

Collaborating in the Same Room—What a Concept!

Collaboration happens because of the interplay of culture, environment and tools with an emphasis on culture. While tools are key enablers, collaboration never happens solely because of tools. That said, real-time tools including instant messaging, web conferencing, videoconferencing, telepresence and virtual worlds plus asynchronous tools including wikis, team sites and social networking are extending and enhancing collaborative culture and eliminating distance as a barrier to business and relationships.

 

Ironically, we’re getting better at collaborating at a distance than when we’re face to face. Assuming we work in a collaborative culture and effectively use tools, we are more likely to share applications and collaboratively produce products and services when distance is an issue. In contrast, when we’re all in the same room, too often we meet rather than collaborate. Some highly-collaborative organizations are designing their workplace environments to enhance brainstorming and collaboration.

 

Microsoft has created a new research entity in its business division called Office Labs, which is focusing on the future of how we work. One effort involves exploring how to more naturally interact with information.  At the Microsoft CEO Summit in May, Bill Gates demonstrated an “intelligent white board” or touch wall called Plex. Plex has scanning cameras at its base, so that it can detect when users touch its surface. Using our hands, we can zoom out to reveal documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, browsers and other applications. We can touch a document, flip through its pages, and zoom in to examine flow charts and other embedded elements. We can also use our fingers to draw on Plex.

 

Intelligent white boards are one tool that may enhance collaboration when we’re sharing the same physical space. Ultimately, every horizontal and vertical surface in collaborative rooms could be an inexpensive intelligent display. Like collaboration at a distance, same-room collaboration requires the right culture, environment and tools.

Malcolm Gladwell: Measurement Methods Killing Creativity and Innovation

Malcolm Gladwell is about to turn talent recruitment and development upside down. Last 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…

Collaborative Music and Video Production Changing Entertainment Business

Budding musicians, filmmakers and other artists are creating value through collaborative production. Online creative collaboration now goes well beyond finding and meeting like-minded artists. Now people are producing artistic works collaboratively without sharing physical space. This is having an increasing impact on creativity, the product and the business of art.

Not long ago, gatekeepers controlled the relationship between artists and audiences. NPR’s “All Things Considered” broadcast a compelling story last Saturday about Robert Goldstein, an NPR staff librarian. You can listen to the story here. In the late 1970’s, Goldstein was a guitarist for the Urban Verbs, a Washington, D.C. band. The Urban Verbs almost made it…

 Band members had a connection with the Talking Heads and producer, Brian Eno. Eno was reportedly “blown away” by the Urban Verbs and offered to produce some tracks. Record labels were initially enthusiastic, and Warner Brothers signed the band. However, Warner Brothers reportedly dumped the Urban Verbs after Rolling Stone “slaughtered” the band with a bad review.

While gatekeepers including big media, distributors, producers and others still have an impact, the balance is clearly shifting in favor of unknown artists. Aside from social media sites like Facebook and MySpace, which connect artists with fans and other artists, collaborative production sites take creative collaboration to the next level. These include TheNetStudio for music and Rootclip for film and video. The difference between these and social networking sites is analogous to the difference between using enterprise collaboration tools to design and produce products and services and using such tools for meetings. Collaborative production clearly creates greater value than just connecting.

TheNetStudio is a virtual recording studio through which artists can submit songs for collaboration. Somebody on an island in the South Pacific who has composed a great song can collaboratively create a finished product with musicians in Paris, New York or Los Angeles without ever sharing the same physical space. TheNetStudio, which uses a subscription model, currently enables asynchronous collaboration but will ultimately provide real-time music production as technology evolves to support ultra high quality synchronous sound over the Internet. Currently, sites including Ninjam, eJamming and Musigy offer real-time, online musical collaboration.

In the film and video realm, Rootclip provides an initial “root” clip, one-to-two minutes of video that begins a story. Collaborators determine the path the visual story takes by submitting one-minute videos to move the story from one chapter to the next. The Rootclip community votes on which videos should be used for the next chapter. The creator of each winning video chapter receives $500 and acknowledgment in the credits. The winner of the final chapter round gets a trip to the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan and a meeting with filmmaker, Michael Moore. Rootclip’s business model is advertising, and ironically big media (the E.W. Scripps Company) is supporting the startup through its venture capital arm.

The big-picture impact of collaborative production is how the medium is changing the product. This phenomenon goes well beyond reproducing or approximating musical or video collaboration in which collaborators share the same physical space. As efforts like TheNetStudio and Rootclip proliferate, artistic endeavors will reflect the input of people from multiple cultures and regions. Finished works will increasingly reflect a broader and perhaps different perspective.

Oh…as for the Urban Verbs, the band recently reunited for a show at the 9:30 Club in D.C.

BMW, Daimler and Collaborating with Competitors

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. 

Adobe Acrobat Connect Becoming Enterprise-Ready

I’ve been using Adobe Acrobat Connect for more than a year, and I’ve come to appreciate its simplicity. The web conferencing program has fit the bill as a Minneapolis-based colleague and I have collaborated on refining The Culture of Collaboration workshop.

The latest version of Acrobat Connect Pro, which Adobe is releasing today, includes a host of features that will appeal to many enterprises. Key new features involve presence and regulatory compliance. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. Corporate IT directors, particularly those in highly-regulated industries, get nervous about real-time collaboration tools. As David Slater, Adobe’s group product marketing manager, mentioned to me last week, the feedback his team got from IT people could be summed up this way: “If you don’t take compliance seriously, we can’t take you seriously.”

Well, that message resonated with Adobe. The new version of Acrobat Connect Pro enables capturing, archiving and editing collaborative sessions, online meetings, and text chat. Certain industries would prefer no retention capability, and that’s possible too. Also, the updated software provides advanced authentication to verify that users are who they say they are. Administrators can also selectively restrict functionality for particular users plus provide privacy notices and secure permission from participants before recording online meetings.

Regarding presence, Adobe has integrated Acrobat Connect with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Live Communications Server plus IBM Lotus Sametime and Jabber. Later this year, Acrobat Connect will interact or “federate” with public IM networks. So it’s easy to check a colleague’s availability and launch an IM session right from an Acrobat Connect meeting.

What differentiates Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro from other real-time collaboration solutions is the simplicity of the user interface and the ease of integrating video into collaborative sessions using its Flash platform. Adobe is focused on making video as easy for knowledge workers to deal with as text. Incidentally, the cost of Acrobat Connect Pro is roughly $500 per seat for a perpetual license or $500 per seat per year for a hosted version with fewer features.

Web conferencing is transitioning from a one-to-many presentation or training tool to a few-to-few collaboration tool.  Recently, my colleagues and I formalized our continuing research into all facets of collaboration by establishing The Culture of Collaboration Institute. Our research indicates that users want tighter integration between real-time and asynchronous collaboration.

Now that Adobe has refined real-time collaboration, the company should now think more about what happens if somebody misses an online meeting or collaborative session. How can they quickly access the parts of the session relevant to them? How can they effectively contribute asynchronously? Focusing on questions like these helps fit collaboration into work styles.