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.

Virtual Worlds and Cisco's Evolving Culture

As organizations adopt virtual worlds, there is growing confusion about when telepresence or videoconferencing may fit the bill and when virtual worlds make more sense.

 

Virtual worlds such as Second Life and Qwaq Forums enable geographically-dispersed colleagues to collaborate in a shared, immersive 3D environment. Qwaq is particularly suited for business. For more on Qwaq, see my September 21, 2007 post. Typically, avatars represent each collaborator and there’s audio without interactive video.

 

At the American Society of Training and Development International Conference last month in San Diego, corporate managers packed a session on using virtual worlds in the enterprise. The buzz was that virtual worlds make more sense than videoconferencing in part because people are getting more accustomed to a gaming-type experience. That supposition is debatable, because tools must fit the situation and the culture. For a performance evaluation, virtual worlds would be a poor choice of tool. Telepresence would work, if a team member is a continent away and a face-to-face meeting is impossible.

 

On Friday, I had a broad discussion with Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.  Chris, a Canadian, joined Cisco 18 months ago after serving as vice president of marketing for Netopia, which became the broadband home unit of Motorola. Our discussion ranged from virtual worlds to collaborative culture, and the conversation flowed easily and informally perhaps because Chris was relaxed and enjoying the informality of his cottage on the lake outside Toronto.

 

“If it’s a casual relationship, video is less important,” Chris noted. Such a relationship might include tech support sessions, customer service calls, and some sales calls. In such cases, virtual worlds may offer better opportunities for branding than videoconferencing. Several years ago, there were many predictions that we would soon be using interactive video for customer service calls. This has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. However, if vendors begin thinking differently about telesales and customer service and start considering these transient relationships as opportunities to build relationships over time, interactive video may be useful.

 

Regarding culture…like many people who work for companies that are adopting collaborative cultures, Chris has had to adjust. He previously embraced the command-and-control approach. However, Cisco has moved away from a competitive, authoritarian culture and has adopted a more collaborative culture in which team members from many functions and regions participate in making decisions.

 

My sense is that Cisco has made this shift for at least two reasons:

 

1) Collaboration creates greater value

 

2) Cisco sells a range of collaborative tools including unified communications and telepresence.

These tools, as I’ve written about extensively, take hold far more effectively in collaborative cultures. So, Cisco clearly wants to set an example.

 

Chris and I also talked about the merging of real-time and asynchronous tools. Cisco is now launching WebEx Connect, which provides a collaborative space through which colleagues can connect in real time through web conferencing plus collaborate after the real-time session ends. Colleagues who may have missed a web conference can search the audio and listen to key parts of a web conference after the fact. Users can also post comments about web conferences.

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.

Collaboration Means Knowing When to Step Aside

“Do you want to be rich or do you want to be king?” That’s the question Mark Perry, general partner with New Enterprise Associates, asks founders of portfolio companies who resist being replaced. Often, venture capitalists like Mark seek to replace founding CEO’s with leaders who are more suited to take a company to the next level.

 

Collaborative leaders willingly step aside when it’s the right decision for the company. After all, many people have a stake in a company’s success including investors, employees and customers. For a founder to remain CEO because of ego and bravado can damage the company he or she has worked hard to create.  And, as Perry points out, the rewards for everybody are often greater when the founding CEO moves on at the right juncture.

 

At the 19^th Annual IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference last month in San Francisco, venture capitalists and executive search consultants debated issues including CEO succession on a panel called “Building a Management Team in 2008.” The panel included venture capitalists Mark Perry of New Enterprise Associates, Cameron Lester of Azure Capital Partners and Mark Sugarman of MHS Capital plus recruiter Aaron Lapat of J. Robert Scott. Recruiter Jeff Kuhn of FLG Partners moderated the panel.

 

The VC’s agreed that it becomes obvious over time if the CEO puts his or her own success above that of the company. This is exactly the kind of behavior smart VC’s seek to identify before they invest. Cameron Lester of Azure Capital Partners recommends asking founders the question, “If this company grew beyond you, would you be willing to step aside?”

 

Stepping aside, deferring to others, and soliciting input are among behaviors key to collaborative organizations of all sizes.  When we use collaborative tools including web conferencing, it’s important to relinquish control and let colleagues take the cursor while sharing applications. In a broader sense, collaborative people understand how their expertise contributes to collaborative work and know instinctively when to defer to those with complimentary skills.

 

Challenges for collaborative leaders include resisting the control paradigm and inviting input from all levels and functions.  Then it’s easier to recognize when changing roles, relinquishing authority, or even leaving the organization benefits the company. The acid test is whether stepping aside creates organizational value.

Collaborating in the Same Room—What a Concept!

Collaboration happens because of the interplay of culture, environment and tools with an emphasis on culture. While tools are key enablers, collaboration never happens solely because of tools. That said, real-time tools including instant messaging, web conferencing, videoconferencing, telepresence and virtual worlds plus asynchronous tools including wikis, team sites and social networking are extending and enhancing collaborative culture and eliminating distance as a barrier to business and relationships.

 

Ironically, we’re getting better at collaborating at a distance than when we’re face to face. Assuming we work in a collaborative culture and effectively use tools, we are more likely to share applications and collaboratively produce products and services when distance is an issue. In contrast, when we’re all in the same room, too often we meet rather than collaborate. Some highly-collaborative organizations are designing their workplace environments to enhance brainstorming and collaboration.

 

Microsoft has created a new research entity in its business division called Office Labs, which is focusing on the future of how we work. One effort involves exploring how to more naturally interact with information.  At the Microsoft CEO Summit in May, Bill Gates demonstrated an “intelligent white board” or touch wall called Plex. Plex has scanning cameras at its base, so that it can detect when users touch its surface. Using our hands, we can zoom out to reveal documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, browsers and other applications. We can touch a document, flip through its pages, and zoom in to examine flow charts and other embedded elements. We can also use our fingers to draw on Plex.

 

Intelligent white boards are one tool that may enhance collaboration when we’re sharing the same physical space. Ultimately, every horizontal and vertical surface in collaborative rooms could be an inexpensive intelligent display. Like collaboration at a distance, same-room collaboration requires the right culture, environment and tools.

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…

BMW, Daimler and Collaborating with Competitors

Collaborating with competitors involves yin and yang, two opposing and simultaneously complementary facets of a single phenomenon. This balance can create substantial value, particularly when the collaboration involves common processes that provide no competitive advantage. An example of this is the Exostar consortium, which has brought efficiencies to purchasing through a shared, online environment.

BMW is currently in talks with its competitor, Daimler, to produce and purchase vehicle components including engines. As a story by Edward Taylor in today’s Wall Street Journal points out, Germany’s archrival luxury car makers have determined that collaboration may give them bigger economies of scale to prevent further erosion of margins.

Ford Motor Company has successfully reduced costs by sharing components across its brands. The premise is that there are many commodity parts that have little to do with customer perception of brand value. In Ford’s C-Car shared technologies program, engineers and executives of Mazda (partially owned by Ford), Ford Europe and Volvo collaborated to reduce development costs for specific small car models. An added benefit is that Ford has reduced internal competition among brands and increased the sharing of best practices.

Since BMW and Daimler are smaller than Ford, the German companies have fewer opportunities to achieve economies of scale without collaborating across company lines. The Wall Street Journal quotes a source who says that executives and engineers from both companies “from the top right down to the middle management” are discussing collaboration.

My experience in working with numerous organizations on implementing collaboration is that a bottom/up strategy is just as important as top/down. For BMW or Daimler to collaborate with an arch rival involves a cultural shift, and there will undoubtedly be resistance. Therefore, leaders must engage and involve team members at all levels and corners of the organization in this shift so that both organizations will ultimately embrace the new way of working. 

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.”

Real-Time Collaboration Transforming Social Networking

Many organizations think they’re collaborating by making internal social networking available. However, many minimally-collaborative people have personal sites. Enabling social networking with real-time functionality creates new possibilities for organizational collaboration.

I gave a speech several months ago to U.S. government officials who are focused on getting agencies to collaborate. The agencies were using wikis and a sort of internal MySpace, and the culture was in the early stages of becoming collaborative. A central theme of my talk was how real-time collaboration is changing business models and how we work.

Presence, I explained to the government audience, would soon transform social networking by letting us know who’s online and available for spontaneous interaction. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. With a single click from somebody’s MySpace page or the internal equivalent, a colleague could launch an instant messaging session. The collaborators could then escalate the chat into a web conference or videoconference.

So…I was delighted to read a story in today’s New York Times headlined “Online Chat, As Inspired By Real Chat” in which Brad Stone nails the shortcomings of typical social networking. “It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator,” Stone writes. The story describes how several Silicon Valley companies are bringing “live socializing” to social networking. One company, Vivaty, lets users add 3-D virtual chat rooms to Web pages and social networking sites. Vivaty Scenes offers an immersive experience in which users choose avatars to represent them.  Another company featured in the Times story is Meebo, which lets users add instant messaging to blogs, Web sites and social networking pages.

Real-time and asynchronous collaboration are no longer divorced modeds. This means that real-time collaboration will occur more easily, more often and more spontaneously. This impacts our collective culture in that we'll be interacting more in real time through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Within the enterprise, we can read somebody's personal page or a team site and from there connect with people on the fly to resolve issues or make a decision. Nevertheless, improved tools are merely enablers. It takes a collaborative culture to create value through collaboration.

Collaborative Chaos vs. Organization: Where Mind Mapping Fits In

Collaborative companies need both collaborative chaos and organization. Collaborative chaos is the unstructured exchange of ideas to create value. And some of the best, most valuable ideas are born because people are relaxed enough and connected enough to effectively brainstorm. And collaborative chaos encourages idea development.

Some people confuse collaboration with inefficient second-guessing and emphasizing debate and hot air over action. Effective collaboration requires organization and structure. It’s a sort of yin and yang, organization and structure balancing collaborative chaos. Effective collaborative cultures have the flexibility to develop great ideas and engage people regardless of level, region, function or business unit. But they also provide the organization and structure to collaboratively formulate and execute strategy.

Collaborative tools enhance both collaborative chaos and organization, some tools lending themselves to one or the other. Real-time tools including IM, videoconferencing and telepresence are key to collaborative chaos, because they enable geographically-dispersed people to brainstorm. In contrast, asynchronous tools like team sites and wikis help organize collaboration and provide a counterpoint to real-time exchanges.

Mind mapping is an emerging tool that will help us organize collaboration. You can read Wikipedia’s take on mind mapping here. Essentially, a mind map visually represents connections among related information. A Detroit-area startup called Spinscape is developing a user-friendly mind mapping tool that will fit individual work styles and collaborative organizational cultures. The software is currently in a closed beta, but Spinscape invited me for drinks and a demo at a San Francisco hotel suite last week. Product Manager Mark Salamango and Chief Evangelist Jonathan Sapir really get collaboration. They are clearly thinking about how work styles are evolving and translating that thought process into the Spinscape tool. You can learn more about Spinscape from Mark’s Spinscape blog.

Spinscape’s approach to mind mapping could enhance everything from product rollouts to acquisitions. Mind maps resemble org charts and family trees. In a product rollout, one box in the map may link to product images, another to video of previous product rollouts, another to Wikipedia’s entry on the product category, another to internal blogs and wikis on the topic, another to archived meeting video, another to external blogs and news stories.

Mind mapping is a way to keep collaboration on track.