The Culture of Collaboration

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…

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Sustainability Fuels Collaboration Consciousness

Both academia and business are realizing that the lack of collaboration can impede progress. Traditionally, university researchers compete for limited grant money, so there is little incentive to collaborate.

In a Christmas day story in The New York Times, Claudia H. Deutsch reported on several academic sustainability centers that focus on collaborating across disciplines. One is the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The article quotes Nabil Nasr, the institute’s director, as saying “the problem of sustainability cuts across economics, social elements, engineering, everything. It simply cannot be solved by one discipline, or even by coupling two disciplines.” Well said!

Now The Dow Chemical Company, through its foundation, is funding a Sustainable Products and Solutions Program at The Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business at The University of California-Berkeley. Dow is providing $10 million over the next five years and sending a Dow leader to Berkeley as an executive-in-residence. Part of his role is to recruit other industry partners to fund the program. What’s compelling about the sustainability program is that the Department of Chemistry is collaborating with the business school and the program will likely involve students and faculty from other disciplines. The bottom line is that environmental and sustainability concerns run deep enough and are so complex that they’re sparking collaboration among people who would otherwise do one of three things: compete with each other, ignore one another, or remain at odds with each other.

Urgency in the environmental realm is clearly driving collaboration across disciplines, but sustainability is by no means the only area in which universities and corporations should be applying collaborative principles, practices and processes. In the business realm…marketing should be collaborating with research and development, R&D should be collaborating with information technology, sales should be collaborating with the market research group, and so on. This should be happening asynchronously and in real time.

Collaboration and the New York City Subway

Collaboration enhances efficiency and innovation and keeps the equipment maintained and the trains running on time, literally, for the New York City subway system. In the 1970s, the New York subway system was in a shambles. I know, because I rode the subway to school in those years when I was growing up in New York. System delays and breakdowns were commonplace.

(Above image: A New York subway car in 1979. Photo by Doug Grotjahn, collection of Joe Testagrose)

Part of the problem was that the transit system rarely maintained subway cars and instead bought new ones when it had money, which was rare. This, according to a story by William Neuman headlined “After 45 Years, Subway Chief Has Reached His Stop” in the October 13 edition of The New York Times. You can read the story here. Neuman writes that in the 1960’s, a transit system mechanical engineer named Doug Tilton believed there was a better way and developed a plan to perform scheduled maintenance on subway cars, which was then a novel concept. In those days, according to the article, “most managers at the transit agency were not interested in new ideas from their employees.”

In the 1970’s,Tilton gained traction for his proposal by collaborating with Michael Lombardi, an instructor and manager at the transit system. Lombardi saw an opportunity, because the transit system had hired a consultant to address subway breakdowns. Lombardi and the consultant promoted Tilton’s idea and gained the support of top transit officials.

In 1981, the state of New York authorized a multibillion dollar plan to overhaul the city’s transit system. This helped institutionalize the program which is now known as the Scheduled Maintenance System. The transit authority has extended the program to the bus fleet, and transit agencies in other cities have adopted similar programs.

Lombardi told the Times that in 1979, subway cars broke down on average every 4800 miles traveled. Today they break down every 149,000 miles. Collaboration certainly has created value for the New York City subways. Next month, Michael Lombardi will retire as the senior vice president for subways at New York City transit. By collaborating with Tilton and the consultant, he accomplished more than he ever could have alone.

Collaboration Roundup: CEO private lives, Google collaboration, and Adobe CS3

I’ve been on the road speaking on The Culture of Collaboration a lot recently. Meantime, material for this blog has been piling up, so I’ll share a few items:

There was a fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal on September 5 headlined “Scholars Link Success of Firms to Lives of CEOs” by Mark Maremont. You can read the story for free here. The story describes new research involving how the personal lives of CEOs may impact stock prices of their companies. The theory is that a family death or a recent large house purchase are distractions that negatively affect shareholder value.

Among the studies the story mentions is one by two Penn State professors called “It’s All About Me” which is to be published in Administrative Science Quarterly. The study concludes that narcissistic executives take greater risks, leading to bigger swings in profitability of their companies. You can read the paper by Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick here.

The Wall Street Journal story hints that a CEO-centric star culture drives many companies. This is shortsighted leadership. It’s no surprise that narcissistic executives expose their companies to uncalculated risks. Too often, star cultures breed shoot-from-the-hip leadership rather than consensus building through broad input. As companies adopt more collaborative cultures, swagger and narcissism become less appropriate and one leader’s distractions are less likely to jeopardize the company.

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Google Docs let people collaborate on documents screen-to-screen. I’ve been checking out the tool recently. The drawback is that it’s not quite real time, but the potential is huge. Google hosts your documents for free, and you and your colleagues can log in and access them from anywhere.

Google has just enhanced the service with the ability to create and collaborate on presentations from anywhere. The capability stems in part from Google’s acquisition in April, 2007 of Tonic Systems. For more on this, check out Clint Boulton’s September 18 story in eWeek headlined “Google Offers ‘Collaboration in the Cloud.’”

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I’ve been meaning to write more about Adobe and its tools. Core customers for such Adobe products as Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver are highly creative—and creative people are often collaborative. I’ve been checking out some of Adobe’s products recently. Acrobat Connect is the web conferencing tool that enables screen-to-screen sharing and annotating of Adobe’s other products and other applications. You can read my June 18 post about Acrobat Connect here.

I’ve also been checking out the new Adobe Creative Suite 3, which coupled with Acrobat Connect, lends itself to collaborative design. Using CS3, geographically-dispersed designers can create vector graphics, develop web sites, edit images and layout pages collaboratively. Marketing people can collaborate with designers in real time, annotating everything from brochures to web designs.

Spiders Getting Collaboration Religion?

Are spiders becoming more collaborative? Experts are debating how and why spiders have spun a giant “web site” in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas.

The spiders created a “white fairyland” encompassing many trees. What perplexes experts is that spiders are not particularly collaborative creatures. Unlike other insects including bees and ants, spiders normally work alone in gathering food and building their homes.

So what gives? One theory is that a rare social species of spider cooperated to build a large colony. Social spiders sometimes form colonies in tropical areas in the southern hemisphere, according to an expert quoted in The Dallas News. You can read the story here. Hmmm….social networking among spiders. What’s next? Spiderpedia or SlinkedIn?

Another theory is that multiple species of spiders may have acted in concert.

Perhaps spiders are beginning to understand the potential for collaboration. J

One thing is clear. The web is a huge accomplishment that one spider could never have achieved working alone.

And, yes, the giant Texas spider web is a reminder that we can create more value collaborating than competing.