The Culture of Collaboration

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.

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)?

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.

Collaborative Law

Competition, arguing, and maneuvering defines law as it’s traditionally practiced. Now, though, a collaborative law movement is gaining traction globally. I had a compelling conversation the other day with J. Kim Wright, a collaborative law practitioner who runs the site CuttingEdgeLaw.com. We discussed Kim’s new book, Lawyers as Peacemakers: Practicing Holistic, Problem-Solving Law (American Bar Association, 2010).

 

“We have not in recent history been very collaborative folks. We are the people to avoid in society,” Kim began. I knew instantly this conversation was going to be interesting. Kim was referring to lawyers who, she says, graduate from law school with “no heart and no soul.” Kim had read “Smashing Silos,” a column I wrote for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. And she insisted that law is all about silos. “We are taught to compartmentalize everything.” These silos include specialties and sub-specialties of law.

 

Collaborative law begins with the premise that people work out their differences towards the common goal of resolution rather than compete and fight through litigation. This is different from the various forms of court-ordered and pre-court alternative dispute resolution (ADR) such as mediation, because ADR often begins with the premise that if the parties are unable to resolve their differences, the case will proceed to trial. Mediation, for instance, often involves “shuttle diplomacy” in which the mediator runs back and forth between both parties and points out the weakness of each side’s case in hopes of avoiding a trial.

 

In contrast, collaborative law involves an acknowledgment from both parties that litigation constitutes failure to achieve goals and places a premium on preservation of relationships. Divorce and family law practice has been faster to adopt the shift to collaboration than many other specialties. In such cases, collaborative divorce and family lawyers sign contracts committing to resolve cases rather than litigate. If they fail to settle, the contracts require that the lawyers withdraw from the case.

 

Collaborative law grew out of a movement in Minneapolis developed by Stu Webb and others during the late 1980’s and quickly spread to northern California and beyond. The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals based in Phoenix brings together lawyers, mental health professionals, and financial professionals to resolve divorce and other conflicts.

 

One barrier to collaborative law is that many lawyers embrace tradition. “Lawyers hate to be on the fringe. They’d prefer to die than be weird,” Kim explained, adding that her goal is to embrace the fringe. Kim focuses on spreading collaborative law across specialties including corporate law. Too often, corporate agreements encourage conflict and ultimate litigation.  In her practice, Kim abandons “boilerplate” or standard contract language and instead writes agreements in plain language designed to anticipate and prevent conflict. “When a conflict comes up, we’ve actually already talked about what to do if there’s a conflict,” she notes.

 

Like corporations, lawyers are waking up to the value collaboration creates both for practitioners and customers.

Empathy and Collaboration: What's the Link?

Are empathic people more likely to collaborate? Or are collaborators more likely to empathize?

 

Dev Patnaik, author of Wired to Care, and I tossed around these and other questions during an engaging discussion this afternoon. “Collaboration allows for empathy and creativity to occur” is Dev’s view. We can argue this chicken-or-egg question either way, but the point is that empathy and collaboration are fellow travelers. While I argue in The Culture of Collaboration book that collaborating creates value, Dev argues that empathy makes money for companies.

 

Almost everything in business has become data-driven. The thinking is...if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter. Even traditionally less data driven disciplines such as public relations have become more numbers-oriented. Data certainly provides valuable insight, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. After all, the road is littered with businesses that have used numbers—real or manufactured—to hide destructive practices. Bernie Madoff, who’s not exactly a poster boy for empathy, comes to mind.

 

I’ve been noticing recently some cracks developing in this data-obsessed foundation on which we build and grow businesses. Clearly, Dev’s antenna is up, and he’s noticing something similar. Dev likens the shift to the change in painting (canvases, not houses) that occurred after the adoption of the camera. Expressionism replaced realism.

 

According to Dev, we’re moving into the “abstract expressionist phase of management.” It’s no longer enough to be a great numbers person. We’re now expecting more of our leaders, and empathy and collaboration are among those qualities. Because a collaborative organization creates greater value, there’s an increasing role for collaborative leaders. And the same is true for empathy.

 

Understanding the feelings of others is good behavior, but empathy particularly pays off when companies—that is the people who work for companies-- understand what their customers are feeling. And in Wired to Care, Dev deftly weaves into his narrative numerous examples—ranging from Harley-Davidson to Nike—of companies that have achieved impressive results through empathy.

 

Dev asked me about the relationship between empathy and collaboration, and I’ve been thinking more about it since we talked. The strongest link is that both qualities involve focusing less on self and more on others. The opposite of collaborative behavior is internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior. This is a form of self absorption. Another form of self absorption is lack of understanding how others feel.

 

While reading Dev’s book, I wondered whether its author is empathetic. So I asked him. “I’m not a very empathic person,” Dev insisted.  That struggle with empathy, though drives Dev’s interest in the topic. He points to the reputation of Apple CEO Steve Jobs as technologically-challenged. Jobs and Apple are ideally suited to sort out usability, Dev argues, because of this struggle. It’s not exactly analogous, but I take Dev’s point. And at the risk of treading into blurb-like territory, Wired to Care will make you think and act differently.

Collaborate to Fix Venture Capital and Innovation Ecosystem

With a severe liquidity squeeze and a withered initial public offering (IPO) market, the venture capital industry and entrepreneurs face incredible challenges. The infrastructure to take companies public has nearly collapsed.

 

“The ecosystem is broken,” Judy Estrin told an audience at the Tech Policy Summit this week in San Mateo, California. Judy, serial entrepreneur and former chief technology officer of Cisco, was referring to the ecosystem comprising venture capitalists, investment bankers, universities, entrepreneurs, scientists, customers and others that has launched scores of innovative and profitable companies including Intel, Apple, Cisco and Google over the last forty years.

 

Judy has become a crusader for innovation, one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in The Culture of Collaboration book. While there have been “exit” opportunities for venture-backed companies in recent years, those exits have been almost entirely mergers and acquisitions (M&A). “M&A is not enough to spur innovation,” Judy insists. Therefore, we must fix the innovation ecosystem and repair the IPO market to regain innovation leadership.

 

In her book, Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2009), Judy chronicles the breakdown of the innovation ecosystem.  She argues that sustainable innovation never happens in a vacuum. “It is not just a flash of brilliance from a lone scientist, nor is it simply the result of a group going offsite to brainstorm and play team-building games.” Judy also quotes Danny Hillis, former vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, as saying essentially that the key is not only to create the “soup” where people brainstorm, but also to develop a system that translates their ideas into something effective. Clearly, Judy believes that collaboration is key to innovation.

 

Collaboration is also key to fixing the innovation ecosystem. Let’s face it. Greed-fueled star culture helped break the ecosystem. To fix it, we must recruit and promote collaborators throughout the ecosystem. This means funding entrepreneurial teams focused on the fundamentals of building great companies. It also means rebuilding the public trust that companies are rooted in innovation rather than hype. It also means changing expectations to embrace long-term growth over short-term returns.  

Telehealth Revisited

Telehealth is back on radar screens of policy makers, health care professionals, engineers and marketers. As we rethink healthcare economics and delivery systems, technology advances are enabling new approaches and better execution of old approaches. Telehealth can enable healthcare access for underserved populations including rural areas, inner city areas, isolated regions, developing countries, and prisons.

 

 Telepresence creates new opportunities for virtual consultations to approximate face-to-face encounters between providers and patients and among providers. Tandberg and Polycom, established vendors in  telehealth, now offer telepresence for healthcare. Polycom announced last month at the American Telemedicine Association 14th Annual Meeting and Exposition that the Michigan Department of Corrections is using Polycom telepresence for everything from tele-psychiatry to tele-nephrology.  Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group has developed HealthPresence, which combines Cisco TelePresence with patient health data captured by connected medical devices such as stethoscopes and vital signs monitors.

 

In the late 1990’s, I conducted research in telehealth and wrote the “Personal Telemedicine” column for Telemedicine Today magazine. The magazine allowed me to write about every aspect of telehealth with an emphasis on how the tools and delivery mechanisms impact people. The name of the column played off my first book, Personal Videoconferencing (Manning/Prentice Hall, 1996). Since many of the telehealth topics I researched then are now re-emerging, I’ll share one column that’s still available online. It’s called "Twenty Minutes in the Life of a Tele-Home Health Nurse," which appeared in the December, 1997 issue of Telemedicine Today. You can read the column here.

Mentoring Key to Collaboration

Business is rediscovering mentoring, and the economic downturn is accelerating this trend.

 

In this challenging economic climate, organizations are realizing that the expertise of veteran team members coupled with the fresh ideas and enthusiasm of younger team members can drive innovation and profitability. Besides developing deep industry and functional expertise over time, veteran team members have weathered previous economic storms—so that experience is an added driver.

 

Mentoring is essential to collaboration and is therefore a critical component of a collaborative culture. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I identify eleven approaches a leader can use to instill collaborative culture, and establishing a mentoring system is at the top of the list. Mentoring systems can be formal or informal. Intel has established a formal mentoring process that includes an intranet-based system that matches protégés with mentors. Intel has also institutionalized mentoring through job sharing. Two leaders with complimentary skills may co-lead a business unit.

 

According to an August 18, 2008 story in The Wall Street Journal by George Anders headlined “Companies Try to Extend Researchers’ Productivity,” Texas Instruments is formally matching new hires with mentors called “craftsmen” who coach their protégés. New design engineers, writes Anders, can become “fully effective” in three or four years instead of five to seven.

 

Some companies that were founded on collaborative principles or have developed a collaborative culture over decades have successfully used informal mentoring. In these organizations, people naturally seek out mentors throughout the organization. Many Japanese companies, notably Toyota, successfully practice informal mentoring. For less-collaborative companies seeking to instill a collaborative culture, however, it’s essential to establish a formal mentoring system.

 

There are many types of mentoring relationships relevant to organizations. The traditional relationship is between an older, wiser mentor and a younger, motivated protégé. For this approach to work, the organizational culture and HR practices must value the contributions of team members regardless of age and must acknowledge that team members develop at different paces. Some team members contribute the most late in their careers, and typical performance evaluation systems fail to account for this. Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, addresses the disconnect between evaluation methodology and individual talents. For more on Gladwell’s Outliers, see my June 6, 2008 post.

Mentoring can transcend the traditional age-oriented mentor/protégé relationship. People with complimentary skills can mentor each other. For this arrangement to work, people must easily morph from the role of mentor to that of protégé in much the same way as a graduate student may teach undergraduates in the morning and become an apprentice to a professor in the afternoon.

Mayo Clinic’s collaborative leadership model pairs a doctor with a professional administrator for each leadership role. Aside from bringing his or her medical knowledge to decision-making, the doctor’s responsibility is to advocate the patient’s perspective in developing policy. The administrator brings a complementary perspective involving things like business processes. Dr. Glenn Forbes, CEO of the Mayo Clinic’s Rochester, Minnesota campus, told me when I was researching the book that he has had about a dozen leadership partnerships at Mayo. In some partnerships, he has played more of a mentor and in other cases he has played more of a protégé. The mentor and protégé roles are dynamic in a collaborative culture.

Spontaneous Telepresence and Cisco's Collaboration Advances

An overlooked aspect of Cisco’s announcement yesterday of its new collaboration portfolio is tighter integration between the company’s telepresence and unified communications product lines. Collaboration tools are far more valuable—both from the vendor and customer perspectives—as part of an integrated strategy rather than as stand-alone solutions.

 

So far, telepresence has been largely limited to scheduled sessions and has had little integration with unified communications. The real benefit of unified communications is that it enables spontaneous encounters. Unified communications leverages presence (not to be confused with telepresence). Presence lets colleagues find each other, view each other’s availability on “buddy” lists or corporate directories and connect spontaneously through instant messaging, voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing. It’s also possible to do 1-click escalation from one mode to another.

 

The capability to connect spontaneously is essential in supporting the cultural shift to real-time collaboration. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, the move towards collaborative business models is about shifting from the pass-along approach to work to “do it now together.” So as telepresence becomes integrated with unified communications, users will be able to escalate on the fly from IM, voice, and web conferencing to telepresence.

 

Cisco’s new TelePresence Expert on Demand integrates the immersive experience of telepresence with call handling features of unified communications. The product is optimized for business-to-consumer scenarios. A bank branch customer interested in a specialized loan investment or comprehensive relationship can connect instantly with the right expert (read salesperson) in a remote location. Patients at a regional medical clinic can gain access to specialist doctors. “The customer feels as if he or she is sitting across the desk from the expert,” notes Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.

 

Using telepresence in this way is new and will provide many opportunities. However, the concept of expert on demand using video seems newer than it is. After a discussion last week with Chris Thompson about Cisco's upcoming announcement and uses for Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand, I flipped through a book I wrote that was published in 1996 called Personal Videoconferencing. The book describes a broad range of uses for videoconferencing including the expert-on-demand model that Cisco is now marketing for telepresence. Experts I wrote about ranged from financial specialists to doctors to educators. At the time, US Bank, Huntington Bancshares and Citibank were conducting pilot programs using video banking kiosks linking customers with financial product specialists.

 

Telemedicine typically uses real-time video communications to link doctors with patients, doctors with doctors, and other health professionals with doctors and patients. As part of extensive research into telemedicine I began conducting in the 1990’s, I spent time with telehome nurses who deliver expertise to patients via video. While telepresence is currently cost-prohibitive for most home use, the technology could be used in nursing homes and care centers. Here’s a link to a column I wrote in 1997 on telehome healthcare for Telemedicine Today magazine.

 

Telemedicine can extend medical specialties to underserved populations including rural areas, developing countries and prisons. Considering that a drawback of telemedicine is the sub-optimal virtual environment of standard videoconferencing, telepresence could significantly enhance the experience for both patients and doctors.

 

While researching telemedicine in 1999, I visited Pelican Bay State Prison, a maximum security facility which houses California’s most violent criminal offenders. Pelican Bay is in Crescent City, California, a rural community where there is a real shortage of doctors, particularly specialists. Because many of California’s prisons are in underserved areas, the California Department of Corrections began using telemedicine in the late 1990’s to link doctors with inmates. Gastroenterologists, psychiatrists and other specialists saw patients at prisons throughout California via video from a telemedicine services center in Sacramento. Primary care doctors were on site with the patients. Telepresence could have enhanced these consultations.

 

Cisco’s TelePresence Expert on Demand will enhance remote expert applications with a more immersive and natural experience. Also, the product is a major step towards integrating telepresence with unified communications. Cisco says that full integration of telepresence with unified communications for enterprise collaboration is in the works. That advance is essential, because telepresence will become more spontaneous and part of work flow.

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…