The Culture of Collaboration

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.

Washington Times Understands The Culture of Collaboration

Many traditional media outlets have difficulty understanding collaboration. Newspapers, magazines and TV networks are typically steeped in star culture and embrace competition. So the notion that collaborative culture is changing business models and the nature of work leaves many reporters and editors scratching their heads.

Last Sunday, however, The Washington Times showed that it’s head and shoulders above most other traditional media outlets when it comes to understanding collaborative culture and the future of business. For a media outlet to capture the essence of collaboration, the reporter and his or her editor need to be on the same page—collaborating, if you will. Clearly, this occurred at The Washington Times. The paper selected James Srodes to review The Culture of Collaboration book. You can read the review here. Srodes, a veteran business writer, is well-suited to understand the value of collaboration. He is the former Washington bureau chief for both Forbes and Financial World magazines.

According to Srodes’ web site, he is also the biographer of Benjamin Franklin, auto industry maverick John DeLorean and Allen Dulles. Dulles served as the director of central intelligence under U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Currently, the intelligence community is working on adopting a more collaborative culture.

In The Washington Times, Srodes writes:

“Where once there were chains of command, flows of information (and power), central locations and memo buck slips of Talmudic complexity and obtuseness, technology has made it possible for diverse creative and managerial teams operating in locations around the globe to work simultaneously on projects that bring better, cheaper, more effective products on line at an accelerated pace.”

At the end of the review, Srodes notes that the culture of collaboration “may be the most exciting business development since the assembly line.”

Is Ford's New Marketing Head a Star? Plus Keith Richards Provides Collaboration Insight

James Farley is no star, but The New York Times would have us think otherwise. Farley is Ford Motor Company’s new group vice president of marketing and communications. He took the job after spending seventeen years at Toyota, most recently as group vice president and general manager of Lexus.

The Times ran as its business section lead last Sunday a story about Farley headlined “A Star at Toyota, A Believer at Ford.” There is little in the story that would suggest Farley is a star, but the Times nevertheless packaged the story in a way that perpetuates the Myth of the Single Cowboy. This is the notion that one self-sufficient, rugged individual can achieve smashing success without help from anybody. We turn athletes, chefs, surgeons, politicians, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders into stars. The media drives this myth into our living rooms, our organizations and into our consciousness.

In the same edition as the Farley story, the Times travel section's first page promoted a story on French chefs on page 7 as “The New Culinary Stars of Bordeaux.” What about the line cooks, the prep people, the servers and the expeditors? It takes more than a single, star chef to prepare a meal in an upscale restaurant. But the Times and many other media outlets would prefer that we believe one person makes it all happen.

Toyota emphasizes collaboration over star culture. Farley clearly chalked up significant achievements at Toyota, because he collaborated across levels, functions and business units. Rather than practicing shoot-from-the-hip management, Toyota leaders practice nemawashi, which means literally “to prepare a tree’s roots for the soil.” Nemawashi is essentially about getting broad input into decisions and making decisions slowly by consensus. As a star, Farley could never have achieved much at Toyota. As a collaborator, Farley and his colleagues created considerable value.

Over the weekend, I saw the awesome IMAX version of the new Rolling Stones movie, Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the film, Keith Richards discusses his guitar prowess as compared with that of Ron Wood, who shares with Richards the title co-lead guitarist of the Stones. “We’re both pretty lousy, but together we’re better than ten others,” Richards says. This sums up the value of collaboration over star culture.

Dana Holding Corporation Gets Collaborative CEO

Gary Convis is willing to roll up his sleeves and get dirty, and he listens closely and collaborates with people at all levels. The retired chairman of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky is joining Toledo, Ohio-based Dana Holding Corporation, as its CEO.

When I was researching The Culture of Collaboration book, Convis was generous with his time and provided tremendous insight into how collaboration creates value for Toyota. Published reports have focused on Convis’ knowledge of lean manufacturing techniques, but he will likely engage Dana team members in every function, region and level to adopt a more collaborative culture.

Convis speaks softly and exudes confidence, but without a trace of egotism. At Toyota, he expected aspiring leaders to spend time on the assembly line. “When you put in days of working on the line with your own hands building a car, what the team member does every day, that means you really connect with that team member and you have respect for what they do,” Convis told me.

As a collaborative leader, Convis seeks broad input into decisions and expects people to contribute regardless of role or title. He also believes strongly in mentoring, and will guide protégés to adopt more collaborative approaches to leadership. Shoot-from-the-hip managers, information hoarders, and people used to star status will likely need to adapt.

Dana and Convis share some values. The “Dana style” of management emphasizes idea generation from everybody and “cooperation among Dana people globally.” However, Convis will likely work across business units and functions to help nourish seeds of collaboration.

Dana’s values, as described on the company’s web site, include employing, developing and promoting “the very best people based on personal performance and skills.” With Convis at the helm, Dana may change this statement to “the very best people based on collaborative performance and skills.”

Real-Time Collaboration Transforming Social Networking

Many organizations think they’re collaborating by making internal social networking available. However, many minimally-collaborative people have personal sites. Enabling social networking with real-time functionality creates new possibilities for organizational collaboration.

I gave a speech several months ago to U.S. government officials who are focused on getting agencies to collaborate. The agencies were using wikis and a sort of internal MySpace, and the culture was in the early stages of becoming collaborative. A central theme of my talk was how real-time collaboration is changing business models and how we work.

Presence, I explained to the government audience, would soon transform social networking by letting us know who’s online and available for spontaneous interaction. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. With a single click from somebody’s MySpace page or the internal equivalent, a colleague could launch an instant messaging session. The collaborators could then escalate the chat into a web conference or videoconference.

So…I was delighted to read a story in today’s New York Times headlined “Online Chat, As Inspired By Real Chat” in which Brad Stone nails the shortcomings of typical social networking. “It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator,” Stone writes. The story describes how several Silicon Valley companies are bringing “live socializing” to social networking. One company, Vivaty, lets users add 3-D virtual chat rooms to Web pages and social networking sites. Vivaty Scenes offers an immersive experience in which users choose avatars to represent them.  Another company featured in the Times story is Meebo, which lets users add instant messaging to blogs, Web sites and social networking pages.

Real-time and asynchronous collaboration are no longer divorced modeds. This means that real-time collaboration will occur more easily, more often and more spontaneously. This impacts our collective culture in that we'll be interacting more in real time through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Within the enterprise, we can read somebody's personal page or a team site and from there connect with people on the fly to resolve issues or make a decision. Nevertheless, improved tools are merely enablers. It takes a collaborative culture to create value through collaboration.

Venture Capitalists Investing in Semantic Web Deals, Enterprise Social Networking

As social networking permeates our collective culture, enterprises are demanding more business-oriented tools to support social networks.

At the Dow Jones VentureOne Summit in Redwood City, California on February 26 attended by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, the sessions and cocktail hour hummed with talk about collaboration. One particularly compelling panel addressed “Consumerprise: Just How Will Consumer Technologies be Utilized by the Enterprise.” The panel, moderated by Emily Westhafer of Dow Jones,  included Antony Brydon, founder of Visible Path; J.B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator; Ajay Gandhi of BEA Systems and Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital. Participants discussed why many senior leaders of Fortune 1000 companies are interested in a “Facebook for the enterprise.”

Applications for enterprise-oriented social networking tools range from finding and collaborating with experts to increasing informal social interaction among colleagues. This, in turn, can break down barriers and enhance collaboration.

Despite their interest, many organizations are barring external social networking connections. This will evolve as the control paradigm wanes and organizational culture catches up with the tools.  Companies in many industries have found that collaborating with business partners can create incredible value.

Peter Rip noted that his venture capital firm is looking for investments beyond Web 2.0 and is interested in “semantic web” deals for startups that focus on intelligent structuring of information. The idea here is that machines rather than people should handle more mundane tasks involved in finding, organizing and sharing information and that Web-based applications should understand what individuals want to know.

In his book, Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee describes his 2-part dream for the Web’s future. The first part is that the Web becomes a more powerful way for people to collaborate. This is clearly happening. The second part is that “machines become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’ which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines,” Berners-Lee writes.

However, semantic web start-ups, says venture capitalist Peter Rip, must fit their solutions into the economic problems of the enterprise. This may sound obvious, but too often start-ups push solutions to enterprises without considering how the tools fit work styles, culture and enterprise initiatives.

The Culture of Collaboration Wins Gold Medal

I’m delighted and honored that The Culture of Collaboration has won a gold medal in the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards. The awards are sponsored by Inc. Magazine; Padilla, Speer, Beardsley; and the Jenkins Group. The Culture of Collaboration won the gold medal in the International Business/Globalization category.

The award is by no means an individual achievement. Few things are. The names of over a hundred collaborators appear in the book’s acknowledgments. Also, The Culture of Collaboration reflects the work of the publisher, editors, book designer, cover designer, web designer, graphic designer, and printing professionals.

The awards event is Monday, March 10 in New York City.

Is Coworking Collaborative?

Researchers are studying it. The traditional media is reporting it. And bloggers, obviously, are writing about coworking. It’s the latest work style trend to emerge. Coworking typically involves renting a desk or paying for the right to plop down at a shared table in a communal workspace. It’s a growing option for home-based or freelance professionals seeking to curb isolation and build camaraderie.

In a story in yesterday’s New York Times, Dan Fost describes the coworking movement. In Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Ilana DeBare reported on “Shared Work Spaces a Wave of the Future.” Clearly, there’s something happening here.

Most coworking facilities look and feel much different from temporary or drop-in corporate office space (the image on the left is a coworking space called the Hat Factory in San Francisco). In fact, some coworking facilities remind me of my college radio station. The studios and communal areas of WCBN-FM in Ann Arbor, Michigan were usually messy, often chaotic, and almost always a creative outlet.

Coworking is most effective for professionals who talk sparingly on phones, since people are expected to step outside the coworking space for phone calls. Imagine five people around a table on their phones simultaneously!

So, is coworking collaborative? That depends. Undoubtedly, including people engaged in different enterprises under the same roof sparks synergies. And without offices or cubicles, interaction can happen on the fly. An entrepreneur working across from a web designer need only call across the table to get design input. A technical writer can engage a software developer with a tap on the shoulder. Relationships form, and trust may develop.

Collaboration, however, requires many cultural elements including shared goals. In collaborative organizations, people come together across disciplines, departments, roles and regions to create value. The shared goal may involve slashing product development time or closing sales more effectively or curing a disease. Coworking invites input from others, but usually without shared goals. One person has a stake in the input, while the other provides advice as a friendly gesture or deposit in the favor bank. Coworking may lead to collaboration, but collaboration is by no means automatic. Of course, coworkers may discover they share some goals and then join forces to start a business or curb climate change or elect a candidate.

The main connection between coworking and collaboration involves people from different disciplines interacting in an informal physical environment. This, in turn, encourages informal interaction which reinforces, but does not create, The Culture of Collaboration.

Collaborative Chaos vs. Organization: Where Mind Mapping Fits In

Collaborative companies need both collaborative chaos and organization. Collaborative chaos is the unstructured exchange of ideas to create value. And some of the best, most valuable ideas are born because people are relaxed enough and connected enough to effectively brainstorm. And collaborative chaos encourages idea development.

Some people confuse collaboration with inefficient second-guessing and emphasizing debate and hot air over action. Effective collaboration requires organization and structure. It’s a sort of yin and yang, organization and structure balancing collaborative chaos. Effective collaborative cultures have the flexibility to develop great ideas and engage people regardless of level, region, function or business unit. But they also provide the organization and structure to collaboratively formulate and execute strategy.

Collaborative tools enhance both collaborative chaos and organization, some tools lending themselves to one or the other. Real-time tools including IM, videoconferencing and telepresence are key to collaborative chaos, because they enable geographically-dispersed people to brainstorm. In contrast, asynchronous tools like team sites and wikis help organize collaboration and provide a counterpoint to real-time exchanges.

Mind mapping is an emerging tool that will help us organize collaboration. You can read Wikipedia’s take on mind mapping here. Essentially, a mind map visually represents connections among related information. A Detroit-area startup called Spinscape is developing a user-friendly mind mapping tool that will fit individual work styles and collaborative organizational cultures. The software is currently in a closed beta, but Spinscape invited me for drinks and a demo at a San Francisco hotel suite last week. Product Manager Mark Salamango and Chief Evangelist Jonathan Sapir really get collaboration. They are clearly thinking about how work styles are evolving and translating that thought process into the Spinscape tool. You can learn more about Spinscape from Mark’s Spinscape blog.

Spinscape’s approach to mind mapping could enhance everything from product rollouts to acquisitions. Mind maps resemble org charts and family trees. In a product rollout, one box in the map may link to product images, another to video of previous product rollouts, another to Wikipedia’s entry on the product category, another to internal blogs and wikis on the topic, another to archived meeting video, another to external blogs and news stories.

Mind mapping is a way to keep collaboration on track.

Kaltura and Wikimedia Enable Collaborative Video Creation

Video is by no means a requirement for collaboration, but its role is expanding.

When I reported for television stations early in my career, getting a story on the air was—at its best—a truly collaborative effort. Photographers, producers, assignment editors and reporters worked in concert to produce compelling stories. In the editing room, a photographer and I would sit elbow-to-elbow choosing shots, integrating natural sound, and basically creating a visual story.

Now we’re in a global virtual editing room in which people can edit and produce videos collaboratively regardless of geography. Kaltura is open sourcing its collaborative video making software and is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation. The idea is to bring rich media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki web sites. You can check out the beta here. The move combines and extends two collaborative trends: sharing user-generated video and wiki-based collaborative text writing and editing.

Think of the possibilities. People across the world can capture historic moments and shape history collaboratively through video. People can collaboratively create travel videos as an alterative to the tourism board videos. And in education, the opportunities are limitless. Students can co-create animated content and videos about everything from political science to parapsychology or from anatomy to anthropology.

In the business realm, companies can generate brand excitement and customer interaction and input by inviting people to co-create videos on motorcycles, hot tubs, books, clothing, skiing…you name it. Within the enterprise, organizations can enhance wikis with rich media. Doing research on a previous product launch? View the collaborative video that your colleagues produced. Taking a business trip to the Mumbai office? View collaborative video on the facility, the local leadership and local events.

As collaborative and compelling as video wikis (should we call them vikis?) are, how about taking them a step further? The next step would be the ability to collaborate in a real-time mode in which we can interact over voice or video over IP while simultaneously editing and producing videos? Leading digital effects companies in the film industry are already creating value through collaborative, real-time video production using telepresence and videoconferencing. But there are broader possibilities for real-time, consumer-generated video content. After a candidate holds a rally, political junkies who shot video could connect through instant messaging, escalate to VOIP interaction and produce a video on the fly. In the enterprise, people throughout an organization along with business partners could capture a product roll-out globally and produce and publish a video in real-time.

Integrating Kaltura’s technology with wikis will immediately create broad-scale asynchronous collaborative video editing and production. And the move is a significant step towards real-time collaborative video creation. The possibilities are limitless in that anybody with Web access can participate.