The Culture of Collaboration

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, 20 bikes a day. And SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. (aka The Dump) also gets 10 to 20 pieces of exercise equipment—everything from elliptical machines to NordicTrack skiers. Each day the dump also receives about 20 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.”

Dana Holding Corporation Gets Collaborative CEO

Gary Convis is willing to roll up his sleeves and get dirty, and he listens closely and collaborates with people at all levels. The retired chairman of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky is joining Toledo, Ohio-based Dana Holding Corporation, as its CEO.

When I was researching The Culture of Collaboration book, Convis was generous with his time and provided tremendous insight into how collaboration creates value for Toyota. Published reports have focused on Convis’ knowledge of lean manufacturing techniques, but he will likely engage Dana team members in every function, region and level to adopt a more collaborative culture.

Convis speaks softly and exudes confidence, but without a trace of egotism. At Toyota, he expected aspiring leaders to spend time on the assembly line. “When you put in days of working on the line with your own hands building a car, what the team member does every day, that means you really connect with that team member and you have respect for what they do,” Convis told me.

As a collaborative leader, Convis seeks broad input into decisions and expects people to contribute regardless of role or title. He also believes strongly in mentoring, and will guide protégés to adopt more collaborative approaches to leadership. Shoot-from-the-hip managers, information hoarders, and people used to star status will likely need to adapt.

Dana and Convis share some values. The “Dana style” of management emphasizes idea generation from everybody and “cooperation among Dana people globally.” However, Convis will likely work across business units and functions to help nourish seeds of collaboration.

Dana’s values, as described on the company’s web site, include employing, developing and promoting “the very best people based on personal performance and skills.” With Convis at the helm, Dana may change this statement to “the very best people based on collaborative performance and skills.”

Venture Capitalists Investing in Semantic Web Deals, Enterprise Social Networking

As social networking permeates our collective culture, enterprises are demanding more business-oriented tools to support social networks.

At the Dow Jones VentureOne Summit in Redwood City, California on February 26 attended by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, the sessions and cocktail hour hummed with talk about collaboration. One particularly compelling panel addressed “Consumerprise: Just How Will Consumer Technologies be Utilized by the Enterprise.” The panel, moderated by Emily Westhafer of Dow Jones,  included Antony Brydon, founder of Visible Path; J.B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator; Ajay Gandhi of BEA Systems and Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital. Participants discussed why many senior leaders of Fortune 1000 companies are interested in a “Facebook for the enterprise.”

Applications for enterprise-oriented social networking tools range from finding and collaborating with experts to increasing informal social interaction among colleagues. This, in turn, can break down barriers and enhance collaboration.

Despite their interest, many organizations are barring external social networking connections. This will evolve as the control paradigm wanes and organizational culture catches up with the tools.  Companies in many industries have found that collaborating with business partners can create incredible value.

Peter Rip noted that his venture capital firm is looking for investments beyond Web 2.0 and is interested in “semantic web” deals for startups that focus on intelligent structuring of information. The idea here is that machines rather than people should handle more mundane tasks involved in finding, organizing and sharing information and that Web-based applications should understand what individuals want to know.

In his book, Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee describes his 2-part dream for the Web’s future. The first part is that the Web becomes a more powerful way for people to collaborate. This is clearly happening. The second part is that “machines become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’ which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines,” Berners-Lee writes.

However, semantic web start-ups, says venture capitalist Peter Rip, must fit their solutions into the economic problems of the enterprise. This may sound obvious, but too often start-ups push solutions to enterprises without considering how the tools fit work styles, culture and enterprise initiatives.

Ford Keeping Volvo: Collaboration a Factor?

Collaboration was percolating beneath the surface of Ford Motor Company’s announcement last Thursday that it would focus on fixing rather than selling Volvo. I argued in an August 3 post entitled “Why Ford Should Keep Volvo” that the greatest value Ford stands to gain by keeping Volvo is the Culture of Collaboration. You can read my post here.

In the announcement, Ford said that it has developed a plan for Volvo. The priority is to improve the unit’s financial performance, which has been stymied by several factors including foreign exchange rates. Another objective is to increase “synergies” (essentially collaboration) between Ford-brand operations and Volvo, particularly in product development and purchasing.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about highly-collaborative enterprises. Ford is included mostly because of Volvo. While Ford’s collaborative culture is a work in progress, Volvo collaborates constantly and is consensus-driven. In short, Ford has much to learn from Volvo on many levels. Clearly, Ford CEO Alan Mulally wants to accelerate collaboration between Ford and Volvo. Until recently, Alan ran Boeing Commercial Airplanes—and Boeing is among the most collaborative companies. My sense is that Alan is the right leader at the right time for Ford. He understands the value collaboration can create. Clearly, the desire to collaborate with Volvo is playing a role in Ford’s decision to keep the unit.

Overcoming Fear of Failure Enhances Collaboration

Zane Safrit, the highly-collaborative CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, has added substantially to the conversation about how accepting and learning from failure enhances collaboration. Incidentally, Zane is a living, breathing example of a CEO who leverages collaborative culture and tools to create value.

Conference Calls Unlimited has integrated many collaborative tools into its culture. Using the basecamp Wiki product from 37 Signals, Zane notes, helps eliminate backdoor channels of conversation and decisions at Conference Calls Unlimited. But minimizing fear of failure is more about the culture Zane has helped instill than it is about the tool per se. Rather than trying to hide mistakes, team members feel comfortable sharing work and ideas for all to see. Some ideas work and a few fail, but everybody keeps learning and collaborating; and the company benefits from the cultural acceptance that it’s ok to fail. Zane and his team avoid using the word mistake and instead focus on learning and collaborative accomplishments. And the result is that Conference Calls Unlimited, Zane feels, makes fewer mistakes because of the collaborative culture and environment. You can read Zane’s post here.

Meantime, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch are searching for CEO replacements in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. The problem, according to a story (subscription required) by Aaron Lucchetti and Monica Langley in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, is that these firms suffer from a thin talent pool. It seems that the lack of internal CEO candidates stems from a Wall Street culture that is so focused on quarterly returns that leaders quickly lose their jobs if they fail to deliver.

Something else that’s at play on Wall Street is the star cultures that plague many firms. An individual must perform as a star analyst, star trader, or a star executive. If he or she fails, the company is quick to sack the individual. Trust is out the window, and the organization—as we’re now seeing—suffers. This kind of culture gives rise to scandals including numbers fudging. Enron, which had a star culture, comes to mind. In collaborative cultures, team members brainstorm, make mistakes, chalk up successes, and often create far more value for the organization. Overcoming the fear of failing advances collaborative culture and can deliver significant returns.

Bill Gates, Jeff Raikes and Collaboration Microsoft-Style

“The PBX is almost like the mainframe was,” Bill Gates told customers and business partners yesterday at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Gates was referring to the private branch exchange, the device that links businesses to the public switched telephone network. Gates added that the shift from the public switched telephone network to unified communications over Internet protocol is “as profound as the shift from typewriters to word processing software.” Later, Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, insisted that unified communications will transform business communications as much as email did in the 1990’s.

Gates and Raikes were speaking at a launch event for a suite of communication and collaboration products: Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Roundtable. Microsoft Office Communications Server makes multiple collaboration and communication modes available right from business productivity applications. Collaborators can see instantly which colleagues are available and can connect on the fly through instant messaging, voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing. This capability is called presence. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 is the client software, while Microsoft Office Live Meeting is the latest version of Microsoft’s web conferencing software.

RoundTable (see image) is a table-top video and audio communications system that provides a 360-degree view of meeting participants plus tracks the speaker. The most compelling aspect of RoundTable is the ability to capture meeting audio and video and review key portions later.

Microsoft and fifty partners participated in the event. And although “unified communications” is the label these companies are using for the new, merged approach to communications, this effort is as much about enhancing collaboration as about communication. And, in fact, Microsoft customers appearing in a video shown during the event and futurists presenting on Microsoft panels later in the day repeatedly referred to improved collaboration.

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.

Why Ford Should Keep Volvo

As Ford Motor Company refocuses on its core brand and operations, media reports indicate that the company wants to offload Jaguar and Land Rover and may be willing to sell Volvo Cars. These brands comprise Ford’s premier automotive group. For the record, Ford has denied that Volvo is on the block.

Clearly, Ford faces challenges. So far in 2007, Ford’s sales are down more than 12 percent over the same period last year. And Ford has reportedly received initial bids for Jaguar and Land Rover. While Jaguar and Land Rover have been losing money, Volvo is another story. Volvo has been producing profits of $800 million to $1 billion per year, according to a July 17 story in The New York Times headlined “Ford Seeking a Future By Going Backward.” You can read the story here (registration required).

But Volvo’s value to Ford goes beyond sales and even beyond the substantial expertise in safety that the Swedish company has provided to its American parent. The greatest value Ford stands to gain from keeping Volvo is the culture of collaboration. Volvo has a highly-collaborative organizational culture in which hierarchy takes a back seat to results. When they feel strongly about key decisions, junior people are quick to challenge senior leaders.

As I mention in The Culture of Collaboration book, if Volvo’s CEO were to propose a new strategy during a meeting, a junior person would feel comfortable telling him that his ideas require further discussion. Volvo people spend considerable time reviewing, negotiating and discussing until they agree. Then the team proceeds with paced discipline. Some of Volvo’s culture is rubbing off on Ford’s other operations, particularly in Europe, as Ford “commonizes” certain parts and collaborates more across brands.

Ford, which has been stymied in part by hierarchy and lack of collaboration, should keep Volvo and make a concerted effort to apply Volvo’s collaborative principles and culture across Ford’s operations. Volvo derives its culture in part from Swedish culture which is more collaborative than the dominant culture in the United States.

While there are already efforts to integrate more collaborative tools into work styles, Ford needs to focus at least as much on culture as on tools. Meantime, Sweden is proud of Volvo and wants it back. The Swedish newspaper, Dagens Industri, reports that Volvo insiders are trying to arrange for Swedish institutional investors to buy Volvo, should Ford want to sell the unit. You can read the translated version of the story here.

One advantage Ford has is that Alan Mulally has taken the helm as President and CEO. Mulally understands the value of collaboration from running Boeing Commercial Airplanes. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about how Boeing has reinvented itself as a large-scale systems integrator and has shifted away from designing and building airplanes by itself. Boeing now collaborates with design and manufacturing partners to produce the 787 Dreamliner and other planes. The term I use to describe Boeing's new approach is global collaborative enterprise. Mulally should draw from his background at Boeing and from Volvo's example to transform Ford's culture into a collaborative one.