The Culture of Collaboration

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.

Collaboration at Fortune Brainstorm: Green

I came away from the Fortune Brainstorm: Green summit in Laguna Niguel, California convinced that collaboration and sustainability are inextricably linked. Collaboration connects us with a broader ecosystem that creates value for our businesses and also—in a broader sense—for the planet.

 

Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer, conference chair Marc Gunther and their colleagues created a thoughtful, compelling forum in which participants not only exchanged ideas but also developed solutions together on the fly. In other words, people were collaborating and creating value.  

 

Informality is key to getting collaborative juices flowing, and the relaxed physical environment helped. The conference room at the Ritz Carlton featured Herman Miller Aeron chairs and coffee tables with small, sleek monitors on which participants could view close-ups of speakers.

 

Here are some highlights of the conference:

 

Traceability in the supply chain is good for business. That was the consensus of a break-out session in which Arlin Wasserman, vice president of corporate citizenship of Sodexo, Inc., the food service and facilities management company, noted that we need a “massive reinvention of traceability and transparency” in supply chains. Jill Dumain of Patagonia discussed how her company’s web site reveals both the good and the bad. Check out Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles here. Now that’s transparency!

 

Wal-Mart is collaborating with suppliers on a “360 scorecard” detailing social and environmental footprints of products. Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs and government relations, insisted that this effort could affect thousands of products. He also indicated that Wal-Mart would build sustainability into every buyer’s job description.

 

Fear of being accused of “green washing” has prevented Tiffany CEO Michael Kowalski from participating in any environmental conference until now. Kowalski described Tiffany & Co.’s efforts over the last decade to short-circuit the trade in “blood diamonds,” which are often mined by slaves controlled by militias and used to finance wars. Tiffany has reportedly removed blood diamonds from its supply chain by focusing on traceability and transparency. Tiffany can now identify the mined source of fifty percent of its products, according to Kowalski.

 

Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, noted that he has focused on protecting research and development dollars, despite the downturn. This is clearly a longer-term view that’s critical to creating value through collaboration. As I explained in my book, The Culture of Collaboration, Ford has highly-collaborative pockets. Its challenge is to leverage those collaborative pockets to adopt an enterprise-wide collaborative culture. When Bill Ford joined the Ford board in 1988, he was told that he needed to stop associating with “known environmentalists.” Guess he’s having the last laugh considering the growing realization that green initiatives create value.

 

Peter Darbee, President and CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, challenged the state and federal governments to collaborate with utilities in transforming the economy. At the onset of World War Two, the United States migrated from a peace to war-time economy within two years. “We need to do that,” Darbee insisted. “The government needs to get out of the way,” and streamline the permit process so that utilities can build transmission lines in two years instead of eight or ten.

 

Jeffrey Hollender, president and “chief inspired protagonist” of Seventh Generation, challenged participants to create products and services that “restore the Earth rather than being less bad.” He insisted that manufacturers should consider the entire lifecycle of products.

 

In an incredible story of collaborative leadership, Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, described how he reached out to union leaders after learning of a 6-day sit-in by workers at the shuddered Republic  Windows and Doors plant in Chicago. Rather than waiting to buy assets through the bankruptcy court, he proactively engaged the people who make windows and listened to their concerns. Serious Materials, which manufactures windows which Surace says are 400 percent more efficient than dual pane windows, ultimately bought the plant for $1.45 million and rehired the 250 laid-off workers.

 

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton delivered the conference’s closing keynote with a call to action that federal and state governments and private industry move beyond policy talks and “operationalize” energy efficiency, carbon reduction and other green initiatives.  He mentioned two particularly interesting initiatives that the Clinton Global Initiative is enabling in collaboration with private industry.  

 

Project 2 Degrees developed with Microsoft and others provides online tools that let cities establish a baseline for greenhouse gas emissions, create action plans, track successes for emissions reduction, and share experiences.  Cisco  is investing $15 million to reduce traffic congestion in cities through its Connected Urban Development Program, which uses information and communications technology to monitor emissions. 

 

 “What we don’t have is enough information sharing in real time,” President Clinton insisted.  Real-time information sharing is key to collaboration whether we’re reducing emissions or developing products. So the discussion of green initiatives comes full circle to spontaneous, on-the-fly collaboration.  I make the case in my book that the quest for value creation has forced the deserialization of work. The need for real-time information sharing is further evidence that sustainability and collaboration are joined at the hip.

 

Collaborating out of the Downturn Focus of Blog Talk Radio Interview

I discussed collaboration with Zane Safrit yesterday morning on his hour-long Blog Talk Radio show. You can listen to the show here.

 

When he was CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, Zane masterfully used blogging as a marketing and business tool. His small company, based in a rural Iowa community, adopted collaborative culture and tools as an advantage in a marketplace saturated with large players. Zane is a super-capable, collaborative leader.

 

Our conversation ranged from common denominators and motivators for companies wanting to adopt collaborative culture and the biggest mistakes companies make. We also discussed the need to replace star-oriented culture and the role of collaboration in an economic recovery.

 

Zane asked me how companies can balance the need for collaboration with the need for consistency, routines and procedures. It’s a thoughtful question that organizations should consider. I explained that it’s necessary to include collaboration in policies and procedures, so that people are consistently collaborative J.

 

Towards the end of the show, we focused more on the economy. Zane asked me about the biggest trends regarding collaborative culture over the next two years. Here’s what I said:

 

People are going to realize what collaboration is and what it isn’t, and I absolutely believe that collaboration will help deliver us from the downturn. We need to abandon the herd mentality. I blogged about this on March 15, 2009 with a call to action. You can read the post here.

 

There’s a misconception that collaboration is about running with the herd. Real collaboration involves constructive confrontation….coming together to hash out issues, make decisions, improve processes and develop products and services. And it’s much broader than companies. It’s about governments collaborating across agencies and departments, with citizens and with other governments. It’s about people working together to create value in our communities.

 

It’s about changing education so that we’re developing collaborators. The more educated people are, the more competitive they are. Our educational system beats collaboration out of us. That’s changing.

 

I’ve lived and worked in smaller communities where many people get jobs right out of high school. They’re used to working together to cook dinner at the VFW or help neighbors repair tornado damage. It’s this type of attitude that we need to nourish in our country, in higher education, in companies, in and among governments. Coming out of this downturn, star culture and internal competition are unaffordable. Collaboration will drive the recovery.

 

“How will that change our economy, culture, country?” Zane asked me.

I responded:

 

It’ll be back to basics…working together to create real value. The mortgage mess, the financial collapse were rooted in artificial value. We gave the keys to the country and the economy to star competitors… the best and the brightest who went to top schools and competed for themselves without considering the bigger picture. Now we need to entrust our companies, governments and communities to collaborators. And we’re going to build long-term, sustainable value.

Abandon Herd Mentality to Avoid Post-Digital Dark Ages

There’s a dangerous—and convenient—misconception that collaboration is about stampeding with the herd. The misconception is convenient, because often people in organizations and neighborhoods figure out which way everybody’s running, and they follow suit. This tendency leads to mediocrity at best and can poison teams, organizations, industries, the economy, and our collective culture.

 

In contrast, collaboration often requires constructive confrontation, one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in my book. Rather than running in a pack, we can—through collaboration—come together in real time and hash out issues, improve processes and create better products and services.

 

Unlike collaboration, herd mentality is choking off innovation and ingenuity, two cornerstones of the collective culture and consciousness particularly in the United States. Running with the crowd created the dot com bubble, the real estate bubble, mortgage crisis, and arguably fed Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

 

In much the same way the herd embraced and artificially ran up dot com stocks and real estate and plunged the world into a deep recession, the herd is now embracing the downturn with abandon. Media, legislators, regulators and stakeholders that were complicit in the dot com and real estate bubbles are now condemning the behavior they embraced. It’s easy to pile on, but where were these voices during the run up and creation of these unsustainable bubbles?

 

In San Francisco, every day I see a couple of more empty storefronts on my flight path. And it’s the same story in New York. I was walking up Madison Avenue several weeks ago, and shuttered stores lined many blocks. People I know who eight months ago insisted on following the herd to the latest trendy restaurant are now eating take-out tacos or microwaving macaroni and cheese, even though they can well afford to eat in restaurants. Being cheap now propels the herd, so the herd is feeding the recession rather than a recovery. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, called the tendency to hoard rather than spend the paradox of thrift. His point, while controversial, was that unnecessary savings during a recession ultimately lowers savings because of the decrease in economic growth.

 

Businesses faced with a credit crunch are slashing research and development budgets, cutting the meat rather than just the fat, and jeopardizing their futures. With bad economic news monopolizing computer screens, the downturn is feeding on itself.

 

The period between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and the early Middle Ages in the tenth century is often called the Dark Ages. It was an era marked by cultural decline, ignorance, lack of enlightenment and societal collapse. The course on which we are headed as we follow the herd to avoid risk, innovation and investment is towards what I call the Post-Digital Dark Ages. While fiscal prudence and frugality make good business sense even in boom times, many companies are sacrificing long-term opportunities for short-term concerns.

 

A Chevron spokesperson recently told me that the company has a dearth of people in their 40’s, because Chevron imposed a hiring freeze for ten years in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The idea was to cut costs, but that strategy provided short-term benefits with long-term repercussions.  The ultimate result is a talent and knowledge gap.  As experienced team members retire, there is a lack of people with long-term institutional knowledge to replace them. Chevron wants to avoid a similar situation in this downturn and will reportedly continue recruiting regardless of short-term economic concerns.

 

Exigent circumstances provide an opportunity to collaborate, think creatively, innovate, and create incredible value. But opportunity must be seized! The downturn is undeniably an exigent circumstance. Rather than succumbing to the herd mentality, we must reject a Post-Digital Dark Ages and engage and challenge one another to define and refine common goals, innovate, reinvent, invest for the long-term, and pave a path towards economic recovery.

 

We now have access to tools and technologies that we could only dream about during previous downturns. Our challenge is to use these tools to strengthen rather than undermine traditional values of innovation and ingenuity. We must harness a range of real-time and asynchronous collaborative tools plus same-room collaboration to enhance real relationships sustainable in person or at a distance. As we build trust, we must strive to improve shared ideas through constructive confrontation and broad input regardless of level, role or region.

 

More broadly, we must change the conversation from doom and gloom to growth and recovery. Let’s change our approach from hibernation and indecision to collaborative action. People are hibernating, because of across-the-board cost cutting and management edicts banning many necessary business expenses. The result is that team members are lying low, unable or unwilling to perform necessary functions. Therefore, management’s attempt to improve balance sheets is actually leaching value out of companies.  Also, we must find and employ collaborative problem solvers who can rethink how we’re doing business.  

 

If we continue stampeding with the herd, we risk the onset of a Post-Digital Dark Ages. Through collaboration, we can ultimately exit the downturn with a more sustainable, long-term focus throughout business, government and society.

 

Toyota's Collaborative Leadership Involves "See it for Yourself"

In selecting Akio Toyoda as its next president, Toyota is reaffirming its commitment to collaborative culture and methods. A key tenet of Toyota is genchi genbutsu which means "see it for yourself.” This is related to the leadership method practiced by HP’s David Packard and Bill Hewlett beginning in the 1940’s and later dubbed “management by walking around.” The idea is that to figure out what’s really going on in an organization, a leader needs to get out of the office, go to factories and loading docks and retail outlets, and get his or her hands dirty.

 

That’s exactly what Akio Toyoda did when he visited a Toyota dealership in Ann Arbor, Michigan last summer. He wanted to personally investigate a pickup truck recall. A story by Micheline Maynard on February 15, 2009 in the New York Times says Toyoda made a trip “so secret that Toyota’s public relations staff didn’t know he was here.” While at the dealership, he reportedly got down on his hands and knees to examine the undercarriage of a truck. At the news conference in January announcing his appointment, according to the Times, Toyoda announced he would pop up everywhere as he did in Ann Arbor.

 

Genchi genbutsu or “see it for yourself” fits squarely into collaborative culture and methods. However, it’s not always possible to fly across the world to see what’s happening. That’s where collaborative tools come into play. Through unified communications, we can find one other and connect regardless of level, role or region. We can escalate IM to voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing and spontaneously hash out problems and make decisions. Visual communications is a critical enabler. An ideal solution is telepresence, which makes people feel practically as if they’re sharing the same physical space regardless of distance.  

 

Our research at The Culture of CollaborationÒ Institute has shown that almost all highly-collaborative companies have integrated some form of real-time, interactive video into their operations. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, Toyota uses a custom-designed visual communications system coupled with product lifecycle management and advanced computer-aided design tools that has become essential to its operations. The system links people at design facilities, plants, and at business partner sites and provides a rich virtual environment for developing and producing vehicles.

 

Two other areas involving collaboration that Akio Toyoda will likely re-emphasize:

1)     Making decisions based on long-term goals rather than on short-term developments

2)     Nemawashi or making decisions slowly by consensus

 

While collaborative culture is never about one person, Akio Toyoda is certainly one role model for collaborative leadership.

Early Input Enhances Collaboration

The most collaborative organizations get broad input into decisions early and often.

 

President-Elect Barack Obama got into some hot water recently when word leaked out that he planned to nominate Leon Panetta as director of the CIA. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly attacked the decision partly because of Panetta’s lack of intelligence credentials and partly because nobody apparently consulted her about the appointment.

 

Aides to the President-Elect insisted that they were planning on getting Feinstein’s input regarding the Panetta appointment before going public.  However, getting a key stakeholder’s input late in the decision-making process is less collaborative and less valuable than getting early input. Requesting late input is often political rather than collaborative and provides an opportunity for the decision-maker to sell key stakeholders on a decision rather than really consider their perspectives.  

 

Collaboration means people participate in decisions regardless of level, region, business unit or function. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about how Toyota makes decisions and the role of nemawashi, which essentially means consensus building. Before the automaker changes the wheel base on a car model, the company gets broad input from those who design and assemble the vehicle. The decision takes longer, but implementation is swift because stakeholders have already anticipated and addressed potential problems.

 

In contrast, faster decisions without broad input may appear more efficient, but such decisions often run into hurdles during implementation and ultimately absorb more of an organization’s resources. Without broad input, people who are impacted often criticize a decision because they had no voice and no stake in the outcome.

 

Had the Obama transition team involved Senator Feinstein earlier in the process, the decision on the CIA director nomination would have reflected her input—and the transition team would have avoided the resulting perception that the President-elect and his staff are making decisions in a vacuum. Ironically, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been focused on making the intelligence community more collaborative. For more on this, see my December 18, 2008 post.

 

Getting early, broad input into decisions enhances collaboration and creates greater value whether the organization is a government, a company, a non-profit, a school, or a club.

CNBC Featuring The Culture of Collaboration

CNBC’s 5-part series on collaboration premieres this Sunday, October 12 at 8 p.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. Pacific time) and will re-air at 1 a.m. Eastern time (10 p.m. Pacific time). The series called “Collaboration Now,” sponsored by BT (British Telecom), will also air on CNBC Europe, CNBC Asia Pacific, and other affiliates. You can view the global air schedule here. I’m one of the guests in the first episode dubbed “Collaborating to Compete.” You can read about the episode here. 

 

My participation is in episode one’s block or section about trust, one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book. During the trust block, CNBC airs a taped story on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which involves an incredible amount of collaboration and trust among Boeing and its global design partners. I put the 787 in perspective by explaining the significant shift in process between the 777 and the 787. The discussion touches on some other key aspects of trust and collaboration.

 

You can watch this discussion after the first commercial.  It immediately follows the satellite interview with former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. I’m on set with host Donnie Deutsch; Chrystia Freeland, U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times; Richard Tait, former CEO of Cranium and Miles Everson, partner with Pricewaterhouse Coopers. The series features several highly-collaborative organizations featured in my book including Boeing, the Dow Chemical Company, and Mayo Clinic.

Check out the show on Sunday or the archived video which will be posted here.

Community Collaboration and Recycling San Francisco Style

San Franciscans toss away at least five bicycles a day. When the mountain bike craze ebbed, that number was higher—at times, twenty bikes a day. And SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. (aka The Dump) also gets ten to twenty pieces of exercise equipment daily—everything from elliptical machines to NordicTrack skiers. Each day the dump also receives about twenty plants, some of which volunteers transfer into the dump’s garden. 

 

I learned many of these statistics Saturday morning from Deborah Munk, who coordinates art and education programs for the dump. Deborah was conducting a public tour, which included a heavy dose of recycling and trash facts. I learned that China is paying top dollar for recycled paper. Every day, the San Francisco dump ships hundreds of bales of paper to China, which helps fuel the country’s growth.

 

This particular public tour was crowded with artists vying for the dump’s Artist-in-Residence program, which gives artists a stipend, a studio, a show, and access to San Francisco’s waste stream so that  they can get first dibs on materials for sculptures, paintings, videos, and other media. Paul Cesewski, former artist-in-residence, turns recycled bicycles among other items into kinetic art. Nancy Calef, who was taking Saturday’s tour before applying for the program, uses recycled objects ranging from eyeglasses to emery boards in her 3D “Peoplescapes.” Peoplescapes are sculpted characters and applied objects on canvas which juxtapose people in recognizable places and situations weaving together a story about contemporary life.  Calef also recycles canvases for a technique called “plane slashing,” which combines two or more paintings into one.

 

The artists collaborate with the recycling sorters, who look out for requested materials. One artist recently asked for some pens, and a few hours later he received hundreds of them. Those pens are now a sculpture. The artists help promote recycling, and they’re one aspect of how people throughout the dump’s ecosystem work together to create value.

 

San Francisco’s recycling program is a study in collaboration. Seventy percent of the two thousand tons of waste a day that flows into the dump is recycled. Clearly, San Franciscans take the time to sort their refuse into bins color-coded for trash, compost and recyclables. And once the waste arrives, union sorters identify items that can be sold as commodities, reusable stuff and electronic waste. The dump makes some stuff, such as recycled latex paint, available for free. Also, more than eighty thousand homes and two thousand restaurants compost their food scraps. San Franciscans get some of their compost back as free soil a couple of times a year, and wineries nourish their vines with soil made from SF compost.

 

Some dump team members are pressing to take collaboration to the next level. “We’re just scratching the surface,” insists Bob Besso, recycling manager for Norcal Waste Systems, Inc., which runs the dump. Currently, San Franciscans pay $107 a ton to dump waste. SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. sells much of the recycled waste as commodities. All that exercise equipment becomes scrap metal. Besso believes the dump should designate drop-off areas where specialists could evaluate specific categories of items such as exercise equipment and bicycles, furniture and textiles, clothing and other items. Rather than charge for accepting these reusable items, the dump could take them for free and sell them at a higher price than that of a commodity. Garbage Reincarnation, Inc, a non-profit in Santa Rosa, California has achieved success of this sort. Besso believes the San Francisco dump could become a model for large-scale reincarnation of waste.

 

SFRecycling & Disposal, Inc. comprises an ecosystem of collaborators who are striving to create greater value through innovation, education, and brainstorming. The SF Dump’s approach reminds us that rather than letting new ideas die on the vine, our challenge is to improve ideas through collective input so that we achieve awesome results.

Lodestar Gets Nearly 700 Nominations for $250K Collaboration Prize

The Lodestar Foundation has received 600 to 700 nominations for its first annual $250,000 collaboration prize. Today is the deadline, and I just got off the phone with Lois Savage, the foundation’s president. Lois tells me that the impetus for the prize is the lack of models for collaboration among non-profits. The prize process creates the opportunity to gather information about effective collaborative practice models that academics and non-profit practitioners can study.  

 

Too often in the non-profit sector, funders try to drive collaboration by forcing organizations with similar objectives and interests to work together. Lois calls them “shotgun weddings.” These usually fail. Similarly, successful collaboration in the for-profit workplace requires more than tools and an edict to collaborate.

 

The Collaboration Prize recognizes collaboration among two or more nonprofit organizations that would otherwise provide the same or similar services and compete for money, clients and staff. The Lodestar Foundation, created by real estate developer Jerry Hirsch of Phoenix, focuses on process and structure of non-profits rather than on specific philanthropic activities. Lodestar’s guiding principle is encouraging non-profits to use efficient business practices. Collaboration fits into that framework by maximizing resources and reducing competition among organizations tackling similar issues. Lodestar has funded cooperative ventures and new organizational structures including coalitions and mergers.

 

Here’s how the prize selection process works: La Piana Associates of Emeryville, California, a management consulting firm for non-profits, will review submissions for eligibility. AIM, the Arizona-Indiana-Michigan Alliance, will review nominations and select eight semi-finalists. AIM is a consortium that includes The Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation at Arizona State University, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, will chair a panel that will choose the recipients from among the finalists.

 

The Lodestar Foundation is one of a growing number of foundations that are embracing collaboration. In July of 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced 16 grants totaling $287 million to fund an international network of highly- collaborative research consortia focused on developing an HIV vaccine. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the Myelin Repair Foundation’s collaborative research model. The model creates incentives for data sharing and collaboration among scientists at different universities working on treatments for multiple sclerosis.

 

While the non-profit sector has focused recently on adopting efficient business practices, the for-profit sector may also look to non-profits for guidance. There is certainly room for knowledge transfer among both sectors to share successful collaboration models.

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.”