The Culture of Collaboration

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)?

Enhancing Products with Collaborative Services

Last Wednesday, I stopped into Rosetta Stone’s splashy event in a trendy nightclub in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Company officials were on hand to demonstrate Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe. Chris Spiller, executive producer, demonstrated the Spanish version of the popular software for learning languages.

Chris and I discussed how immersing oneself in another culture is by far the best way to learn a language. And we shared stories about the overemphasis on grammar in high school foreign language classes.  It turns out that cultural immersion is exactly what Rosetta Stone had in mind when developing Version 4 TOTALe. “We looked at what are the pieces of that experience we can recreate through technology,” Chris explained.

Rosetta Stone has recently transformed its offering into a hybrid product/collaborative service. This means that no longer must customers learn a language in a vacuum. They can now collaborate with other learners globally and can also learn from language coaches who interact with customers through one-way video and two-way audio. Adobe provides and hosts Rosetta Stone’s video and audio through its Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service Platform. Incidentally, today Adobe is releasing version 8 of a related web conferencing product called Adobe Connect.

Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe includes Rosetta Studio, which involves live, interactive coaching. The bundle also features Rosetta World, which lets users collaborate with fellow learners. There are lots of activities and games that geographically-dispersed users can do together while talking with each other in the language they’re learning via voice over IP (VOIP) and text chat. Other activities pair learners with native speakers who are, in turn, learning their partner’s language. This collaboration among customers accelerates learning and creates value.

Getting customers to collaborate with each other can turn a maturing product into a virally-adopted habit. Smart companies realize that collaboration is more than customers participating in discussion forums. It’s about getting customers to create value using a product or service together in real time. Depending on the product, collaborating among customers may involve creating, learning or playing.

Besides enhancing learning, the collaborative service lets Rosetta Stone enhance its business model and presumably its revenue. The software includes three months of access to Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World, and customers can then buy more access. I suspect that this hybrid software-as-a-product/collaborative service model is a prelude to a pure software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering.

While Rosetta Stone officials say the company has no plans to expand offerings beyond language software and services, this collaborative approach to online learning could apply to subjects ranging from history and geography to algebra and physics. A user in India and a user in Germany could collaborate to learn the geography, history and culture of their respective countries.

The big picture is that companies in many industries can create value by encouraging customers to collaborate with each other. This produces greater stickiness by building interactive communities around products with the potential of generating new revenue streams.  And this goes well beyond software. Take a product like a motorcycle. With a 3D model of the motorcycle plus interactive audio and video, enthusiasts can collaborate on maintenance, diagnosing problems, and doing repairs. Collaborating among customers could also apply to furniture. Using a 3D model of a home or office and choices of virtual furniture, customers could exchange ideas and collaboratively design spaces for living and working.

Collaboration among customers can build brands, increase marketplace stickiness, and create new revenue streams.   

 

Cisco's John Chambers: the Hardest Part is the Culture

I was watching Cisco CEO John Chambers do his trademark walk-and-talk style keynote yesterday at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square as Cisco was kicking off its Collaboration Summit when suddenly John interrupted his pitch for collaboration.

 

“Do you know what the hardest change is in this?” he queried the audience rhetorically. “As any CEO will tell you, it’s the culture.”

 

John’s observation resonated with me in that the fundamental premise of The Culture of Collaboration book is that “without a culture of collaboration, the best processes, systems, tools and leadership strategies fall flat.” In the book, I also note that “the overwhelming reason why collaboration eludes organizations involves culture.”

 

Understanding the role of culture in creating a collaborative enterprise is paramount, particularly as Cisco introduces 61 collaboration products. Collaboration tools are key enablers, but they are far more effective in enabling collaboration in enterprises with collaborative cultures and processes.  Cisco has been focusing on collaboration more than any other initiative as an organizational imperitive and in product efforts. Now the company is fixated on persuading customers that it has reached a milestone in innovating collaboration. With that in mind, Cisco vice president of enterprise solutions Alan Cohen, a history buff and blogger, noted that Cisco was announcing its slew of products on the 20^th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall and observed that it was one of the “biggest transitions in our history.”

 

As Tony Bates, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Group, highlighted Cisco’s major product introductions, he emphasized the increasing role of video in collaboration—from Flip Video camcorders to WebEx web conferencing to telepresence—and the interactivity of these tools. You can read details of the product announcements here.

 

At a cocktail party following the keynotes, Tony and I had an engaging conversation about how the role of video has evolved. I mentioned that when I was researching my first book, Personal Videoconferencing, in the mid-1990’s, there was considerable push back against real-time video as a viable business tool. People were scared of the camera, and there was a pervasive view that one needed to have highly-honed presentation skills to use videoconferencing. Tony observed that people are increasingly accepting that the way they conduct themselves in meetings and in one-on-one workplace interactions is good enough for many video interactions.

 

Currently, most telepresence and web conferencing interactions are scheduled. As organizational cultures evolve to support more real-time collaboration, video interaction will become more spontaneous. Then real-time video will transcend communications and become part-and-parcel of collaboration. 

Negotiation vs. Collaboration

During a taped television interview last week in New York, I was asked—among other things—about the difference between negotiation and collaboration. In the coming weeks, I’ll have more on the interview, the show and the upcoming air date.

 

I summed up the difference between negotiation and collaboration this way:

Negotiation is “I win, you lose” or “I win bigger than you win.”

Collaboration is “win, win.”

 

Also, negotiation usually involves suspicion and separate agendas. Collaboration requires trust and shared goals.

 

With the increasing interest in collaboration and the race to become—or at least appear—collaborative, there is continued confusion over the meaning of collaboration. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.”

 

To truly collaborate, we must move away from command-and-control, internally-competitive, star-oriented cultures to embrace cultures in which people across the enterprise gain access to the same data and information and provide input into process improvements, market creation, innovation and other key issues and decisions. In a collaborative culture, people feel their input counts regardless of their role in the organization.

 

And there are plenty of misconceptions about collaboration including:

 

Some believe that a strategic alliance is collaboration. Often a strategic alliance is nothing more than a joint news release!

 

Some believe that partnering is collaboration. However, partnerships do not necessarily create value. Partnering can be a prelude to collaboration, but collaboration takes partnering to a new level. In

The Culture of Collaboration book, I use the term global collaborative enterprise (GCE) to describe interdependent companies engaged in shared creation of value, often in real time. That value typically translates into products or services. And there are examples of collaborating competitors creating more value than partners!

 

Business, the media, analysts and others are embracing collaboration as a buzz word. Let’s make sure we go beyond window dressing, understand the real value of collaboration, and unlock that value through the interplay of collaborative culture, tools and environment.

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.

Collaboration and Marketing, Branding and Advertising

Should companies leverage collaboration as a marketing tool? That depends. Too many companies have embraced collaboration as a buzz word or initiative du jour without any real commitment to collaboration. The emperor has no clothes, so to speak. But it makes lots of sense for marketers to use collaboration in branding and corporate image campaigns if the rhetoric is based on something real.

Corporate social responsibility has hit the big time as advertisers discover that consumers and businesses are increasingly likely to buy products they associate with some greater good. The green movement falls under this umbrella. Incidentally, American Public Media’s Jill Barshay reported on this topic Tuesday, December 11 on the “Marketplace” broadcast. You can listen to the story or read a transcript here.

Similarly, collaboration can create a perception of value for consumers and business customers. A collaboration image suggests that the company is innovative, receptive and responsive. There are certainly companies that can make this claim and could really leverage collaboration from a marketing perspective. However, there are still many hierarchical companies that foster competitive cultures in which people live and work in fear and rarely interact outside of their functions, regions or business units. It’s ludicrous and ineffective for such companies to use collaboration as a buzz word or build campaigns around the idea—but it happens!

Currently, I’m researching how collaboration can be used effectively in marketing, branding and advertising. The bottom line is that campaigns must be based on reality rather than me-too marketing.