The Culture of Collaboration

BMW, Toyota and Collaborating with Competitors

They compete in the marketplace, but now they’re also collaborating.

BMW and Toyota have announced they will collaborate in two areas: the companies will share costs and knowledge for electric car battery research, and BMW will supply diesel engines to Toyota. Toyota owns the luxury brand, Lexus, and therefore BMW and Toyota directly compete in the luxury car segment. Both companies have a significant collaboration track record.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how BMW and Toyota create value by collaborating internally and with business partners. The preface, which you can read here, reveals how my visit to the BMW design center in Munich some years ago sparked the book.

So why would two competitors collaborate? Collaborating makes sense within enterprises and with partners, but the marketplace requires pure competition. Right?  Well, that depends.

Collaborating among competitors makes sense when the collaboration:

1. Creates value for both parties
2. Begins with structure and clarity
3. Involves non-differentiating processes

Clearly, the BMW/Toyota collaboration nails number one. “We think that this collaboration will allow for development of next-generation batteries to be done faster and to a higher level,” Toyota Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada said at a news conference. Both companies will share the costs of battery development. 

Toyota will reportedly use BMW’s 1.6 and 2-liter diesel engines for cars sold in Europe beginning in 2014. This is reportedly the first time Toyota has procured an engine from a competitor. According to a story by Yoshio Takahashi and Kenneth Maxwell in the December 2, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal, the collaboration will reduce BMW’s engine production costs per unit by increasing volume. So, value creation is at the heart of this collaboration.

What about #2, structure and clarity? Based on what I know of BMW and Toyota and their approaches to collaboration, chances are this effort involves much of both. In any collaboration among competitors, both parties must establish boundaries for collaboration at the outset. Most importantly, the competing collaborators must determine use and ownership of existing and jointly-created intellectual property. Far fewer problems arise when business unit people, engineers, marketing folks, lawyers and others from both companies hash out these concerns rather than simply handing off the issues to lawyers to hash out in a vacuum.

Regarding #3, I’ve found that collaboration among competitors works best when the effort involves eliminating redundancy in non-differentiating processes. These are typically under-the-hood processes that are not part of a company’s market or product perception.  Two companies that each make hot sauce might use the same bottling equipment. Two newspapers in the same market might use the same printing presses. Entire industries participate in consortiums for purchasing, saving each competing company substantial money. These shared, non-differentiating processes are invisible to the customer. 

Engines are invisible to all but the most die-hard car enthusiasts, so collaborating on this process arguably fits the bill as non-differentiating. Typically, car batteries have nothing to do with the vehicle perception in the marketplace. In the case of electric cars, though, the jury is still out whether the battery is invisible to the consumer. The technology is in its infancy, and therefore the market consists primarily of early adopters. These consumers are more techno-savvy, realize the lithium-ion battery is intrinsic to the product’s technology and performance, and therefore may place a heavier emphasis on the battery in their purchase decisions.

So, it remains to be seen whether battery research and development is non-differentiating for BMW and Toyota. Nevertheless, if both companies can save substantial money on development and bring vehicles to market sooner and customers perceive and actually get better electric vehicles, this collaboration will prove successful.

Slow Money Collaboration

In a cavernous, nearly empty room above the Readers Café & Bookstore in Building C of San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, Woody Tasch sits at a corner table by a lone window looking out on the Bay. It’s the eve of the Slow Money National Gathering, and the organization’s chairman is putting the finishing touches on his opening remarks. He must fend off criticism that his model is “fantasy economics” and impress on the three hundred investors and five hundred or so other attendees that our industrialized food system has become as imbalanced as the financial system was during the depths of the 2008 crisis.

Woody, a former New York venture capitalist who now lives off the grid near Taos, New Mexico, wants to change how we finance food businesses as dramatically as he has changed his own life and career. In the 1980’s, Woody worked as a self-proclaimed “small-time VC” making healthcare investments for Prince Ventures, owned by the Prince family of Chicago.  Ultimately, he transformed himself from a mathematics-driven investor to one with a social conscience with stops along the way as treasurer for a foundation and chairman of an angel investor network called Investors Circle.

“It’s no longer about how much we can take off the table for ourselves,” Woody insists. After getting involved with the global Slow Food movement, the antithesis of fast food in its promotion of sustainability, Woody and his collaborators sought to address the difficulty many sustainable food businesses have getting financing. “It hit me that patient capital plus slow food equals slow money,” he explains.

Woody and his colleagues are enabling microfinance for the food industry and, since 2009, have sparked $6 million in micro loans. Slow Money links growers, restaurants, organic farm suppliers and other food entrepreneurs with consumers willing to lend businesses a few thousand—or even a few hundred—dollars.

“This is not a typical fiduciary model,” Woody explains. “What we are going to be proving over the next decade is that collective intelligence and local knowledge of groups of individuals effectively collaborating will produce positive outcomes both in arithmetic and impact on the community.” In other words, investors can do good and simultaneously get a modest return on investment. At the moment, 3 percent a year in interest is typical.

Slow Money is evolving from advocating individual investments to promoting investment clubs. Compared to angel investing, for which investors must have assets of at least a million dollars or a yearly salary of at least $200,000, the investment club barrier to entry is much lower. As a model, Slow Food organizers point to the No Small Potatoes Investment Club, which provides low-interest loans to Maine farmers and food producers. So far, fifteen investors have each put up five thousand dollars.

After talking with Woody, I stop by the rehearsal for the entrepreneur pitches. These five-minute presentations are not unlike those for technology companies at venture capital conferences. But there is something perhaps more wholesome and genuine and, yes, rougher around the edges, about these pitches.  Some of these food businesspeople have never before spoken at an event. George Weld, owner of both Egg restaurant in Brooklyn and a farm in Oak Hill, New York, speaks of the need to curb the “recurring alienation between rural and urban that plagues the food economy.”

One of the better-received pitches comes from Dr. Hubert Karreman, a veterinarian and founder of Bovinity Health. Hubert’s company manufactures natural alternatives to antibiotics for livestock. He clicks through financials including $250,000 in sales in 2011, provides market share projections and leaves the rehearsal audience whispering "he's gonna get funded."

Slow Food’s goal is for a million Americans to be investing one percent of their money in local food systems within a decade. Meantime, Woody Tasch offers his prescription for the economy. “What we need is rebalancing. Right now we’re lurching towards the global race to the bottom. It’s buy low, sell high, GMO [genetically modified organism], CDO [collateralized debt obligation] capitalism. We have to compete for cheap labor around the planet subsidized by cheap oil and ignoring the medium and long-term social and environmental impact.” Collaborating requires a longer-term focus, and Slow Money is helping enable that evolution.

How Bean Counting Compromised Value at General Motors

Too often companies emphasize numbers over products and forecasting over customers. Such firms typically focus on short-term results over long-term value. This creates greater internal competition and encourages shorter-term supplier relationships rather than enhancing collaboration internally among functions and externally with business partners.

The relentless focus on numbers at the expense of domain expertise figures prominently in the book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters (Portfolio, 2011) by Bob Lutz, former vice chairman of General Motors. Fifty years ago, GM products were the epitome of design. Over the last half century, though, the company’s products have steadily lost traction with customers. This decline culminated in the company’s reorganization under Chapter 11 in June of 2009. While many factors contributed to GM’s bankruptcy, short-sighted bean counting was undoubtedly one of them.

“It’s time to stop the dominance of the number crunchers, living in their perfect, predictable, financially projected world,” writes Bob, who specializes in getting people’s attention. I first encountered Bob early in my career when I was reporting on the auto industry and attending the introduction of the Jeep Grand Cherokee at the 1992 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Bob exuded machismo as he drove the SUV through a plate-glass window into the hall, shocking me and other journalists awaiting the usual dull presentations. At the time, Bob was president of Chrysler.

Bob’s detractors consider him an old-school, shoot-from-the-hip executive who makes decisions based on his gut with little analysis. In reality, Bob understands the need for left brain and right brain driven people to collaborate regardless of their titles or functions. And he encourages more junior people to challenge him. In short, he values constructive confrontation, one of the ten cultural elements of collaboration I introduce in my book, The Culture of Collaboration. 

The former Marine Corps pilot insists that “car guys” should run auto companies, “supermarket guys” should run supermarkets, and “software guys” should run software companies. He concedes that these “guys” can be of either sex. Too often, as I noted in The Culture of Collaboration book, boards of directors and senior leaders believe that if they hire “star players” these supposed stars can and will achieve results regardless of their domain knowledge or industry experience. Some prominent management consulting firms reinforce this skewed logic. The so-called star players are typically numbers-driven MBA’s interested more in units rather than in products and in forecasting rather than in customers. The organization promotes these internally-competitive numbers crunchers and sidelines others who focus on improving products and interacting with customers.

Of course, quantitative analysis is critical to any business. The problem arises when quantitative analysis dominates and pervades every aspect of a business while designing awesome products and creating market stickiness take a back seat. As Lutz chronicles in his entertaining and informative book, once upon a time design dominated the auto industry. Think of the tail fin era of the late 1950’s which gave rise to cars including the 1957 Chevrolet and the 1959 Cadillac (see images, Chevy image courtesy Trekphiler). Designers originated products. By the 1970’s, General Motors had reigned in designers, made design “part of the system,” and assigned product origination to a department called Product Planning staffed by former finance people.

Neither the old design-driven General Motors nor the newer numbers-driven organization is a model of collaboration. In the 1960’s, when design and the designers were at their pinnacle, Lutz writes that  chief designers in well-tailored suits graced magazine covers. Essentially, designers had become stars and expected star status and treatment within GM and in society. Chief designers often silenced and sidelined people in other functions.

When GM reduced the role of designers, the organization empowered product planning to originate products in a vacuum. Handing plans off to designers with the instruction “go design this” hardly enhances collaboration. Ideally, designers would lead a design process with input from, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, sales and dealers. In a collaborative organization, people come together across departmental and functional barriers to share ideas and develop products and services in concert.

At least among senior leaders, GM more recently came closer to this ideal when it hatched the Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid electric/gas car introduced in December, 2010. Lutz, who had advocated an all-electric vehicle, describes how he sat across from Jon Lauckner, former GM vice president of product planning, as Lauckner sketched out the first drawing depicting the “sequential” hybrid technology of the Volt. This differs from the “parallel” hybrid technology of the Toyota Prius (The Volt is designed to go forty miles without using gasoline unlike the Prius which alternates between electric and gas). And almost immediately people Lutz dubs “unconventional thinkers” in design and product planning began collaborating.

Whether it’s skimping on ingredients in restaurant kitchens or using inferior paint in automobile assembly plants, focusing on numbers over products and forecasting over customers reinforces the wrong organizational values. In time, team members become comfortable sacrificing products and shortchanging customers. Ultimately, value evaporates.  More collaborative organizations use quantitative analysis as a tool rather than as the primary organizational focus.

Collaborative Chaos at the New York Times

Journalism, at its best, involves constant collaboration.

In television newsrooms, reporters, producers and assignment editors engage in a continuous conversation about stories and often edit scripts together in real time. While real-time group writing is a relatively new phenomenon in education and business, reporters and producers frequently write story introductions and “teases” together. This traditionally involves no electronic screen-sharing or web conferencing, but rather colleagues shouting to one another across the newsroom or two people hunched over a single terminal. In newspaper newsrooms, a similar continuous dialogue occurs among reporters and editors. Some colleagues get to know one another so well that they even finish each other’s sentences.

All of this newsroom interaction requires informality. Corporations and government agencies are increasingly embracing informality, because of a growing realization that formality compromises value creation. But informality is nothing new in newsrooms. The informality of journalism dates back at least to the early 20^th Century when few reporters got “formal” higher education and the socialization that accompanies it. Newsrooms then felt more like police stations in which colleagues sat in an open room exchanging sarcastic, irreverent banter. And though most journalists (and many police) now graduate from college and the journalistic culture has evolved, newsrooms have nevertheless retained much of their informality.

Films about journalism have captured this informality. Examples include the 1931 and 1974 versions of The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, about newspaper reporting in Chicago. Also, the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula, about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal, reveals the constant conversation among all the players in the Post newsroom. The conversation continues down corridors and into the elevator where executive editor Ben Bradlee (played by Jason Robards), in a dramatic moment, instructs Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) to “print it” meaning to run a story about Watergate.

Fast forward to 2011. Traditional journalism is under siege, in part because of the Great Recession’s 
ravages but mostly because of systemic shifts in the media industry. These include shrinking audiences and advertising dollars flowing to Web-based alternatives including social media. Against this backdrop comes Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary directed by Andrew Rossi, which attempts to capture a leading newspaper and its people at a pivotal point. (Photo of Times newsroom above courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

The reviews have been mixed, a charitable adjective for Michael Kinsley’s take on the film that ran in—of all outlets—the New York Times itself. Kinsley takes the documentary to task for flitting “from topic to topic, character to character, explaining almost nothing.” Kinsley suggests that the movie is disjointed and confusing. The film does take up a series of topics: WikiLeaks, the Pentagon Papers, the Times survival, Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal, Twitter’s impact, the Times’ plagiarism scandal involving former reporter Jayson Blair, Iraq, the Apple iPad, and the ups and downs of the Tribune Company, among others.

And all of this comes in the form of a continuous conversation upon which we as the audience eavesdrop. “Like a shopper at the supermarket without a shopping list, “Page One” careens around the aisles picking up this item and that one, ultimately coming home with three jars of peanut butter and no 2-percent milk,” Kinsley writes. Yes, but the collaborative process is rarely pretty.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I identify the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that are typically present when collaboration works. One of these elements is collaborative chaos, which is exactly what Page One reveals. Collaborative chaos, the unstructured exchange of ideas to create value, lets the unexpected happen and generate rich returns. In the film, we see former cocaine addict and current Times media columnist David Carr sharing ideas with his sources, his colleagues and his editor, Bruce Headlam. These exchanges culminate in value creation, Carr’s columns. And the film invites us into the Times daily story conferences during which editors jostle over which articles should appear on the front page.

Kinsley, no stranger to journalism as the former editor of the New Republic and Slate, would undoubtedly argue that while confusion may prevail in newsrooms, it’s the job of the filmmaker to present a more organized picture. But attempting to sanitize or beat the collaborative chaos out of the Times or any news operation would present a distorted view. It would be like eating street food in an upscale setting, a current trend in the restaurant business incidentally.

Journalism, and collaboration itself, involves a continuous conversation during which collaborative chaos prevails, recedes, only to prevail again all the while creating value.

Non-Profit Collaboration Creating Value

The cost of internal competition plagues almost every company. But the private sector is by no means the only sector that competes. With limited funding, particularly during the Great Recession and the fledgling Great Recovery, non-profit organizations have increasingly competed for shrinking grant dollars. And while the for-profit sector may regard the non-profit sector as populated by less-competitive do-gooders, competition in the non-profit arena can rival that of private industry.

For private-sector companies, competing in the marketplace furthers objectives, namely to increase revenue and market share.  In contrast, non-profit organizations compromise their objectives when they compete with other non-profits that share their mission.  The cynical among us might believe that the first goal of some non-profits is preserving themselves to employ administrators and staff and that their service mission is secondary. Let’s assume, though, that the primary goal of most non-profits is to further their mission. In that case, collaboration among non-profits creates far greater value.

Some foundations have developed programs to encourage non-profit organizations to collaborate. The Myelin Repair Foundation, which is working to cure multiple sclerosis, has recruited five principal investigators from different universities. With input from the researchers, MRF developed a Collaborative Research Process, which addresses everything from tools to incentives. You can read more about MRF in my July 16, 2009 post. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a collaborative research consortia comprising 165 investigators globally to accelerate HIV Vaccine Development. For both MRF and the Gates Foundation, collaboration is reducing time-to-a-cure.

Foundations are by no means the only funders favoring and, in some cases, insisting on collaboration among non-profits that they support. In some cases, funders use a heavy hand in forcing organizations to share resources or join forces. But ordering people to collaborate misses the point. The most successful non-profit collaborations are those in which non-profits and their funders collaborate to achieve common goals.

This is exactly what’s happening with San Francisco’s Tenderloin Technology Lab, which provides computer and Internet access plus instruction to disadvantaged people looking for jobs. Because most jobs require online applications, people struggling with keeping a roof over their heads are often shut out of the job market. The lab is a collaboration among St. Anthony Foundation, San Francisco Network Ministries and the University of San Francisco. Beginning in 2001, USF was providing computers and other support to the two organizations’ separate computer labs. As demand rose with the economic downturn in 2008, USF collaborated with the two organizations to open a combined Tenderloin Technology Lab. The lab now serves a hundred people a day.

Last Thursday, I dropped into the Tenderloin Tech Lab as the collaborating organizations were unveiling an updated space. Rev. Stephen Privett, a Jesuit priest and president of the University of San Francisco, described the collaboration among UCSF, St. Anthony Foundation and San Francisco Network Ministries as three legs of a stool. “Without the three legs, the stool doesn’t stand. We can get a lot more done together than we can separately.” I chatted with Craig Newmark, founder and customer service representative, of craigslist, which supports the lab. (Yes. Craig’s business card includes both titles.) Craig praised the lab for delivering real results to real people. “One thing you learn doing customer service is what’s real,” he insisted.

Shifting from competing to collaborating can create substantial value for non-profits and the people they serve. “It involves putting down our egos and saying we can do this better,” according to Cissie Bonini, director of programs for St. Anthony Foundation, which began feeding San Francisco’s needy in 1950. And the private sector can take a cue from this non-profit collaboration. When we put our egos aside, we can share more, internally compete less—and create far greater value.

Recasting Knowledge Management

Collaboration is shaking up the once-staid field of Knowledge Management (KM) as enterprise social media and interaction play an increasing role. The premise of KM is that an organization’s intellectual capital or “intangible” assets comprise its greatest value and that therefore the organization must manage these assets.  Through the 1990’s, KM gained traction with the growth of data networks, the evolution of database technology and the increasing premium placed on information.

KM has traditionally supported command-and-control organizational cultures and structures in which the organization seeks to gather, retain, unlock and control its resources. And often believing that data drives knowledge, organizations have pushed to populate data repositories. Enterprise blogs and wikis have added an unstructured element to creating and capturing knowledge. As social media takes hold in organizations, KM practitioners are rethinking their craft, integrating social media and collaborative tools into their frameworks, and recasting KM as embodying collaboration. The goal is to broaden KM’s appeal and, in particular, engage younger team members.

“I define knowledge management as information management and collaboration,” insists Katrina B.  Pugh, author of Sharing Hidden Know-How (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Kate, a KM consultant and former vice president of knowledge management at Fidelity Investments, believes gathering data should take a back seat to sharing information. “It’s much more about improving those interactions than populating those repositories,” she explained during a compelling conversation recently.

People often use the terms social media and collaboration interchangeably. Social media describes a category of tools that can be used to collaborate. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” It’s quite possible to create no value while using social media. It’s also possible to create substantial value. And considering the current excitement over these tools, I asked Kate whether there’s a downside to social media when it comes to KM. “It’s losing the person-to-person interaction,” she quickly responded. By person-to-person, Kate means voice, video and face-to-face encounters. I suggested these real-time encounters have a more “three-dimensional” quality. Kate agreed. “The best social media interactions are the ones that follow a conversation,” she noted.

Conversation, in fact, is at the heart of Kate’s approach to KM outlined in her book. She calls the approach "Knowledge Jam." The idea is to transfer knowledge from “knowledge originators” to “knowledge brokers” through facilitation, conversation and translation. A facilitator, either an outside consultant or internal team member, jump starts the Knowledge Jam during a series of structured 90-minute sessions.

I raised two issues with Kate:

1. Many knowledge originators are “go-to” people who hoard information
2. Is a facilitator necessary?

Absolutely, Kate agrees, knowledge originators may hoard. That’s why “there must be something in it for them [to share knowledge],” Kate explains. And that something is that “in a shifting environment, they need to learn the new playing field.” In other words, to remain relevant and keep their jobs, Kate believes knowledge originators will trade their knowledge for new context and skills. What about the need for a facilitator? Yes, Kate says, getting the conversation going between knowledge originators and knowledge brokers requires a facilitator.

I get that a facilitator can jump start Knowledge Jam, but ultimately organizations must share knowledge and collaborate naturally. The problem with consultants as facilitators (full disclosure: I’m a consultant) is that when they step aside, the organization can easily revert to previous behaviors. The problem with internal facilitators is their perceived and, at times, actual lack of neutrality. For collaborative organizations, sharing must become part of DNA. And KM is part of that equation.

As KM evolves to fit with more collaborative organizational cultures and structures, the term knowledge management also needs updating. Management suggests hierarchy and command-and-control. How about knowledge collaboration (KC)?

MIT Technology Review Featuring The Culture of Collaboration

Technology journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Gomes and I had a thought-provoking chat earlier this week about collaboration. Lee was interviewing me for a question-and-answer style profile in the MIT Technology Review. The Review was capping off a series of stories about collaboration with the interview on The Culture of Collaboration book. I’m glad that the editor accurately summed up my perspective in the headline: "Collaborating Takes More than Technology."

You can read the article here.

Lee did a good job playing devil’s advocate. Among the issues and questions he raised: “Command and control might not be pretty, but it gets things done. Couldn’t an overemphasis on collaboration paralyze an organization?" I responded this way:

"What paralyzes an organization is when management compromises value by failing to tap ideas, expertise, and assets. What also paralyzes an organization is when requests for decisions languish in in-boxes rather than hashing out issues spontaneously. Paying a few people to think and paying everybody else to carry out orders creates far less value than breaking down barriers among silos and enabling people to engage each other spontaneously."

Changing Education

Businesses face challenges in becoming collaborative partly because traditional education systems often discourage collaboration. These systems condition workforces and organizations to operate in command-and-control mode. Now there are promising signs of an educational upheaval that mirrors shifts in business and government. Many universities are seeking to reinvent themselves to preserve their relevance.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the shift in the role of the professor from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.”  Driving the shift is the decline in credibility of professors. In an era of rapidly changing information,  students can search online for ideas more quickly than teachers and professors lecture about them. “Students don’t really believe their professors,” is the way David Edwards put it during our conversation last week.

David Edwards, who’s the Gordon McKay professor of the practice of biomedical engineering at Harvard, has collaborated with colleagues to update his university’s role in educating students. David shares my view that both universities and businesses must provide physical and cultural space to spark and collaboratively develop ideas.

David is the author of The Lab (Harvard University Press, 2010). This compelling book chronicles the growth of Artscience Labs, an international network of idea labs David and his colleagues have developed. The labs spark “idea translation,” a process of repeated experimentation, exhibition, prototype critique and team evolution. The book delves deep into emerging approaches to innovation growing out of these interconnected labs which include Le Laboratoire in Paris, The Lab at Harvard, and similar labs at other universities and high schools. Many ideas incumbated and nourished in the labs have become commercial products. These include everything from edible bottles to inhalable chocolate.

The growing Artscience movement draws inspiration from the Bauhaus school that flourished in Germany during the Weimar period after World War One. The Bauhaus concept was a “total work of art” bringing together all arts including design and architecture. Bauhaus emphasized “rationality, functionality” and the need to free art from Bourgeois influences.  The labs break down boundaries between arts and sciences to accelerate learning. This mirrors silo busting and curing Silo Syndrome in business and government that I write about frequently here and in The Culture of Collaboration book. Results of Artscience efforts range from new designs and art to new companies and humanitarian organizations.

Edwards believes institutional boundaries have hampered education at Harvard and elsewhere, and he agrees that similar boundaries plague businesses. Technology and culture shifts have curbed “our ability to curate information and give it any meaning,” David notes. He compares overly-curated art with overly-curated information. Why is it, Edwards wonders, that there are thousands of works in a museum like the Louvre, but that art “experts” and books focus on only a handful of “important” works? Not to mention, I was thinking, all of the art--some of it excellent-- that never makes it into the collections of the Louvre and other museums.

So, a new cultural model is necessary. And guess what this model involves? “Nothing gets done without intense collaboration. We can no longer ignore it,” David insists. Amen. Some design firms advocate a formal process for brainstorming and ideation. In contrast, the approach to collaboration, innovation and ideation practiced in Artscience Labs is decidedly less formal. “I’m very skeptical about rules for ideation or idea development,” David says. Freedom to take risks and make mistakes is key, and so is the ability to realize mistakes and quickly develop a new idea or approach.

Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker

Management consultants, technology vendors, and human resources departments often segregate workforces into “knowledge workers” and everybody else.  In a collaborative organization, every worker is a knowledge worker. Every team member contributes, shares knowledge, and participates in making decisions, whether he or she is loading crates, designing products, servicing customer accounts, creating tactical marketing plans, or determining long-term strategy.

My current column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com entitled "Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker" describes how organizations can desegregate the workforce. You can read the column here.

Video Driving Enhanced Collaboration

“Like television archives, stored desktop videoconferences can potentially provide a legacy of our meetings, presentations, and collaborations. These video anthologies may follow us through our careers and personal lives.”

This observation is from the book, Personal Videoconferencing, published in 1996 by Manning/Prentice Hall. It so happens that I wrote the book. Recently, I’ve been re-reading the book, articles and columns on collaboration that I wrote in the mid-1990’s to assess how collaboration has progressed over the last fifteen years. This exercise is particularly relevant, because I’m currently writing my third book on collaboration. And to know where collaboration is headed, it’s essential to understand its evolution.

There’s no need to pre-empt my forthcoming book here, but I feel compelled to share some thoughts about the role of video. In 1996, video was the most controversial aspect of collaboration. Engineers, marketing people, and senior leaders were divided on the value of video. Videoconferencing on desktop and notebook computers was emerging and so was non-video web conferencing. Many technologists insisted that people primarily wanted to share documents, spreadsheets and electronic whiteboards rather than see one another. Inside Intel, which was developing an early conferencing system called ProShare, a debate raged on whether to include video in the product. Ultimately, the video proponents won that debate.

In the mid-1990’s, audio conferencing people dominated the conferencing industry and felt threatened by video. So, video was defending itself from assaults from two groups of naysayers: the legacy voice people and the early non-video web conferencing crowd. Essentially, many people with entrenched interests felt uncomfortable using interactive video, disliked how they came across, and lacked vision regarding video’s role in business. In short, they felt threatened by the emerging medium. Their attitude was similar to that of “serious” print and radio journalists towards television news when that medium emerged in the 1950’s.

Fast forward to 2011. The age of YouTube, reality television, and Skype has conditioned us to embrace video. We’re comfortable seeing friends, relatives and colleagues when we communicate at a distance and having them see us. It’s no longer a stretch to accept that video creates an emotional connection second only to an in-person exchange. Nearly every collaborative organization I’ve encountered and almost all of those I feature in The Culture of Collaboration book have not only adopted real-time, interactive video, but also have integrated video into their cultures and business processes.

A few years ago, I gave a speech in London at the Tandberg global sales directors’ meeting. Tandberg leaders sensed a shift in how their customers were making purchase decisions for videoconferencing systems. Increasingly, business unit heads or senior leaders rather than telecom or IT people were calling the shots. So, video was moving from an equipment sale to a consultive sale involvement business processes. I was in London to give sales leaders some pointers about winning in the shifting environment.

Having acquired Tandberg, Cisco is nudging enterprises to adopt video throughout their operations. And Cisco offers a broad portfolio of video products ranging from telepresence to WebEx to Flip video cameras. From a sales perspective, though, Cisco still struggles with some of the same issues that plague other telepresence and visual communication vendors including Polycom and HP. Namely, it’s easy to slip back into pushing boxes of products. The challenge is to collaborate with customers to create value by integrating tools into their cultures and processes.

Ilan Kasan and Grace Kim of Cisco recently demonstrated for me a new version of WebEx. The new version, dubbed the WebEx High Quality Video Experience, offers Active Presence, which is a “film strip” of video feeds showing everybody on a call. Cisco TelePresence offers the same capability, and now people can join TelePresence sessions via WebEx. Plus the new version enables the Apple iPad with WebEx.

Marketing departments of technology vendors are typically bullish on customer adoption forecasts. Cisco is no exception. David Hsieh, Cisco’s vice president of emerging technologies marketing, tells me that within twelve months, 36 percent of Cisco’s top customers will roll out telepresence and video collaboration across their entire enterprises. That percentage climbs to 46 percent in over two years. David and his colleagues believe this, because Cisco gathered its top customers in a room and asked them about their purchase plans. However, my experience with this type of survey is that customers are more likely to reveal purported purchase plans when they are surrounded by other customers---and therefore the results from the customer gathering may be skewed towards greater adoption.

Nevertheless, Cisco believes the survey results indicate something significant. “This represents a major shift in the market. Cisco is going to put a major stake in the ground,” according to David. There’s a difference, though, between rolling out systems and actually integrating tools into workflow, processes and culture. Cisco, Polycom, HP and other visual communications and collaboration vendors must devote greater time and resources to integrating tools into workflow and processes. This approach will create far greater value for their shareholders and salespeople than simply moving products. As customers see other customers creating value  through extending and enhancing collaboration, adoption becomes more viral.

Clearly, the debate has advanced from whether video is necessary in business to how video can be used most effectively to create value.

Real change happens when the culture shifts and tools, including video, become part-and-parcel of how an organization collaborates and does business. Tools rarely create collaboration, but they play a critical role in extending and enhancing collaboration. Sold and used effectively, video is the tool that can enhance collaboration like no other.