The Culture of Collaboration

Collaborative Music and Video Production Changing Entertainment Business

Budding musicians, filmmakers and other artists are creating value through collaborative production. Online creative collaboration now goes well beyond finding and meeting like-minded artists. Now people are producing artistic works collaboratively without sharing physical space. This is having an increasing impact on creativity, the product and the business of art.

Not long ago, gatekeepers controlled the relationship between artists and audiences. NPR’s “All Things Considered” broadcast a compelling story last Saturday about Robert Goldstein, an NPR staff librarian. You can listen to the story here. In the late 1970’s, Goldstein was a guitarist for the Urban Verbs, a Washington, D.C. band. The Urban Verbs almost made it…

 Band members had a connection with the Talking Heads and producer, Brian Eno. Eno was reportedly “blown away” by the Urban Verbs and offered to produce some tracks. Record labels were initially enthusiastic, and Warner Brothers signed the band. However, Warner Brothers reportedly dumped the Urban Verbs after Rolling Stone “slaughtered” the band with a bad review.

While gatekeepers including big media, distributors, producers and others still have an impact, the balance is clearly shifting in favor of unknown artists. Aside from social media sites like Facebook and MySpace, which connect artists with fans and other artists, collaborative production sites take creative collaboration to the next level. These include TheNetStudio for music and Rootclip for film and video. The difference between these and social networking sites is analogous to the difference between using enterprise collaboration tools to design and produce products and services and using such tools for meetings. Collaborative production clearly creates greater value than just connecting.

TheNetStudio is a virtual recording studio through which artists can submit songs for collaboration. Somebody on an island in the South Pacific who has composed a great song can collaboratively create a finished product with musicians in Paris, New York or Los Angeles without ever sharing the same physical space. TheNetStudio, which uses a subscription model, currently enables asynchronous collaboration but will ultimately provide real-time music production as technology evolves to support ultra high quality synchronous sound over the Internet. Currently, sites including Ninjam, eJamming and Musigy offer real-time, online musical collaboration.

In the film and video realm, Rootclip provides an initial “root” clip, one-to-two minutes of video that begins a story. Collaborators determine the path the visual story takes by submitting one-minute videos to move the story from one chapter to the next. The Rootclip community votes on which videos should be used for the next chapter. The creator of each winning video chapter receives $500 and acknowledgment in the credits. The winner of the final chapter round gets a trip to the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan and a meeting with filmmaker, Michael Moore. Rootclip’s business model is advertising, and ironically big media (the E.W. Scripps Company) is supporting the startup through its venture capital arm.

The big-picture impact of collaborative production is how the medium is changing the product. This phenomenon goes well beyond reproducing or approximating musical or video collaboration in which collaborators share the same physical space. As efforts like TheNetStudio and Rootclip proliferate, artistic endeavors will reflect the input of people from multiple cultures and regions. Finished works will increasingly reflect a broader and perhaps different perspective.

Oh…as for the Urban Verbs, the band recently reunited for a show at the 9:30 Club in D.C.

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.

Apollo 13

One evening a couple of months ago during crunch time for production of The Culture of Collaboration book, I flipped on the TV and found the movie Apollo 13. It had been eleven years since I first saw the film. Gene Kranz, the flight director with a trademark crew cut played by Ed Harris in the movie, was kind enough to review the manuscript for The Culture of Collaboration and provide a generous back-cover quote. Gene’s book, Failure is Not an Option, is an excellent account of the Apollo 13 story and his years at N.A.S.A.

The drama of the film reminded me what an excellent example Apollo 13 is of collaboration, particularly because geographically-dispersed people worked together in real time to achieve a common goal and create value. The value they created was saving the lives of astronauts James Lovell, John Swigert, and Fred Haise. This was April of 1970, decades before videoconferencing, instant messaging, application sharing and other collaborative tools were in common use. Collaborating in real time at a distance was relatively new territory.

If you’ve forgotten the details…nearly fifty-six hours into the launch, an oxygen tank explodes causing the spacecraft to lose oxygen and electricity. Carbon dioxide from the crew’s breathing begins poisoning the cabin atmosphere. On the ground and in the spacecraft, crew members improvise a maintenance solution. They use items—including cardboard, a plastic bag, a sock and a hose—that are available in both locations to create a makeshift adapter to convert the main module’s air scrubber for use on the lunar module. The astronauts would use the lunar module as a lifeboat for their safe return to Earth.

There was no time to reflect, no opportunity to table decisions for another day. Nor was there any time to run decisions “up the flag pole.” Collaboration occurred spontaneously. Regardless of their role or rank, people participated in the solution. The Apollo 13 team embraced a culture that encouraged collaboration. Today many organizations seeking to create value from collaboration can learn something from the story of Apollo 13. With the Culture of Collaboration in place, people achieve the seemingly impossible and create awesome value.