The Culture of Collaboration

Collaboration Across Time Zones

The blogosphere is abuzz with comments about The Daily Telegraph’s editorial that we should eliminate time zones in favor of a single “Global Time.”

Since the Telegraph is a British newspaper, Global Time means Greenwich Mean Time. The argument in favor of Global Time is that it’s simple and that New Yorkers will get used to the alarm clock going off at what is currently 11 p.m. EDT.

While a single time zone could solve some problems, it would undoubtedly create other issues—like choosing the time zone that would become Global Time. Another issue is that highly-collaborative companies leverage mirror zones (see my March 16 post) for 24-hour product and service design and development. Shifting to a single time zone would compromise that business model.

The discussion about time zones points up an issue that plagues many organizations. I have worked with global companies that expect the rest of the world to adopt headquarters-driven, real-time collaboration schedules. This means team members in Paris must collaborate at night with a Seattle headquarters or a team in Tokyo must conference at 5 a.m. with headquarters in New York where it’s 4 p.m. The result is that people in other regions feel abused by the home office and can even interpret such practices as cultural insensitivity.

The most collaborative companies reject headquarters-driven schedules. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how collaborative organizations solve time zone problems by rotating convenience among regions. This has particular relevance for scheduled videoconferences and web conferences. The convenience of spontaneous encounters should also rotate based on common sense. If one collaborator or group of collaborators stays up late one week, their counterparts across the ocean may sacrifice convenience the next week. Collaborative leaders must consider work styles and lifestyles of global team members when scheduling interactions or collaborating spontaneously.

It’s time to BREAK OUT of a headquarters-driven collaboration schedule and mindset so that global teams can create greater value.   

Venture Capitalists Investing in Enterprise Collaboration

I spent Tuesday and part of Wednesday at the Dow Jones VentureWire WebVentures conference in San Mateo, California—and collaboration was top of mind for just about everybody attending.

The format of the conference is that CEO’s of startups present to venture capitalists in shotgun-style break-out sessions. This means they have 25 minutes to deliver their message and motivate their audience. VC’s who have either passed up enterprise collaboration investments or folded too soon have renewed interest in the space in light of Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx (see my March 16 post). One VC peppered me with questions about Cisco’s motives as we waited for a presentation to begin. Here are some of the collaboration products/services/companies that caught my eye:

UK-based Trampoline Systems,which just completed a $ 5.8 million financing round, empowers employees to leverage relationships through its SONAR product. SONAR analyzes data in systems including email servers, contact databases and document archives and then maps collaboration and communication patterns and social networks. CEO Charles Armstrong, an ethnographer, is trying to make enterprises more like villages, which often collaborate more effectively than organizations do. By revealing collaboration and communication patterns and the key themes people are interacting about, SONAR makes it easy to find and connect with colleagues who have a relationship to a topic. Breaking down barriers and creating value is what Trampoline is all about.

Qwaq, which I blogged in detail about on March 13, is gaining traction and there was great interest in the company from VC’s at the conference. Also, Fortune 100 enterprises were seeking out CEO Greg Nuyens out in hopes of beta testing Qwaq Forums, the company’s immersive 3D collaboration product. What’s compelling about Qwaq from an investment perspective is the deep talent of the team in highly-scalable, distributed systems and the disruptive nature of the product.

Genius, which has secured $10 million series B financing, is a company founded and run by people with real-time collaboration backgrounds. CEO David Thompson was chief marketing officer of WebEx. VP of Marketing Felicity Wohltman ran marketing for the Breeze product (now Adobe Acrobat Connect) at Macromedia and also worked in marketing at WebEx. The Genius platform provides real-time data to sales and marketing people on the behavior patterns of specific customers and prospects on corporate web sites. Among other features, a salesperson can invite the customer to participate in text chat. The genius of Genius is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales.

Clarizen, which has closed $7 million series A financing, combines project management with collaboration in an on-demand, web-based service. CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski is used to marrying collaboration with other applications. He previously founded SmarTeam, which combined product lifecycle management (PLM) with web-based collaboration. Dassault Systemes bought Smarteam. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I wrote about how Boeing and Toyota use Dassault Systemes tools for near 24-hour global product development.

Serial Entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan is bringing collaboration to online gaming through a company called Winster, which has secured $1.5 million series A financing. The business model is pay-per-play games targeted at middle-aged women. To earn prizes, players collaborate by trading game pieces. As they help each other win games, players chat and develop relationships. Winster is about creating value through collaboration through a beautifully simple interface and business model. In the book, I wrote about realigning organizational recognition and reward systems around collaboration. Jerry has certainly done this in the consumer space.

Virtual Enterprise Applies The Culture of Collaboration

I am delighted to see that the principles covered in The Culture of Collaboration book are taking hold.

Not a day goes by without somebody telling me how the book is helping his or her career, transforming a team or, in some cases, an enterprise. From an author’s perspective, it’s exciting and rewarding to see how organizations are creating value through the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration and the other principles that I wrote about in the book.

This brings me to Wilson F. Engel III, Ph.D. Dr. Engel has posted a detailed review of the book on Epinions.com in which he describes how he and his colleagues read The Culture of Collaboration and successfully applied the principles to their global virtual enterprise.  According to Dr. Engel’s review, "In effect, we used every principle in Rosen's book—which was required reading for our group—and the principles WORK!"

Cisco's WebEx Acquisition

Social networking has attracted the attention of traditional media, bloggers, venture capitalists and others. But there is confusion about the relationship between social networking and collaboration. As Cisco acquires WebEx for $3.2 billion in cash, let’s clear the air.

Social networking has two components: productivity and play. The term collaboration usually refers to productivity and the creation of value rather than play. However, there are distinct parallels. Whether we’re playing networked multiplayer games or we’re using a networked 3D modeling application to design a car or produce digital effects for movies, we are still collaborating in real time. Whether we’re writing a wiki about chess or microprocessor design, we’re still collaborating asynchronously.

Cisco has already made social networking investments focused on play and consumer communities, namely Tribe.net and Five Across. Acquiring WebEx, with its more than 28,000 customers and over 2 million registered users, plunges Cisco deeper into productivity and business-oriented collaboration. Cisco’s broader strategy is to use the network as a platform for consumer and business applications and services.

Some of the coverage of the acquisition requires clarification. The San Francisco Chronicle called WebEx the “leader in videoconferencing” in a story in today’s business section. Actually, WebEx is the leader in web conferencing or what the company prefers to call the “collaboration services market.” Video can be used as an add-on, but most WebEx conferences are one-to-many presentations without video rather than truly interactive sessions. Now that Cisco will drive WebEx, video will undoubtedly play a bigger role. Clearly, the acquisition sets the stage for Cisco to challenge Microsoft in the collaboration services arena.

Mirror Zones for Collaboration

Mirror zones are time zones that are opposite or nearly opposite. It’s a term I coined in The Culture of Collaboration book. The term has much relevance for collaboration.

Using mirror zones, companies can compress product cycle time and time-to-market by creating a near 24-hour product development and design environment. When team members in one time zone sleep, their colleagues in the mirror zone work. Collaboration between the mirror zones happens in real time during the shift overlap and asynchronously the rest of the time. Mirror zones can create value in industries including aerospace, automotive, consumer products, healthcare, pharmaceutical, digital effects, advertising and many others.

In the book, I write about how Boeing is successfully using mirror zones to design the 787 Dreamliner. I also write about how BMW leveraged time zones and set up mirror organizations when engineers were designing the X5. Beyond manufacturing, mirror zones can create substantial value in the service sector.

Collaboration tools—both real time and asynchronous—are key enablers of mirror zones. But it takes more than tools for mirror zones to work. Bridging cultures is key.

Qwaq Exits Stealth Mode with Immersive, Real-Time Collaboration

In a modest building next to a burrito shop in downtown Palo Alto, California, the next generation of collaboration is taking shape. When I stepped into the cramped offices of Qwaq last week, CEO Greg Nuyens greeted me immediately because there’s no receptionist yet. The company is running on seed money and is exploring options for the next round of financing—and Qwaq clearly has many options. Greg, VP of enterprise Remy Malan and I then headed for the makeshift conference room for a demo.

Greg and Remy sat at separate PC’s. On screen, they were each represented by avatars in a shared virtual 3D office environment. This virtual space displayed cubicles, walls, plants, pictures and the like. When Greg passed his mouse to me, I was able to drag and drop any document, spreadsheet, or any other file from the hard drive onto any part of the 3D virtual office environment. Remy and I could move around the office, travel through doors and hallways, meet in a virtual conference room and work in any application on a virtual white board. Or we could take our work to the virtual break room or the front lawn of the virtual building.

Unlike many web conferencing applications which are geared for presentations or passing the baton back-and-forth, Qwaq is optimized for true real-time, spontaneous collaboration. But Qwaq is a hybrid in that it also enables asynchronous collaboration. Unlike most traditional web conferencing which works only while a session is underway, Qwaq Forums is persistent. This means authorized users can access the virtual space any time. Team members in another time zone may wake up to find the results of real-time collaboration that occurred while they were sleeping.

Today Qwaq emerges from stealth mode. For months Qwaq has been fielding inquiries from savvy enterprise engineers and executives who have drawn conclusions about Qwaq’s development work based on the team. Computing pioneer Alan Kay is advising Qwaq. Kay’s work at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) contributed to the development of both the laptop computer and the overlapping windows interface. Also advising Qwaq is David Reed, former chief scientist of Lotus.

Qwaq’s team includes substantial talent in highly-scalable, distributed systems. Founder and CTO David Smith is a 3D pioneer and chief system architect of Croquet. CEO Greg Nuyens was the chief technologist at Inktomi and CEO of Instant802, backed by VC firms August Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Remy Malan, the vice president of enterprise, was the VP of marketing at AtWeb.

Qwaq is bringing the work of The Croquet Consortium to the enterprise. Croquet is an open source development environment for creating large-scale, networked 3D collaborative spaces. Qwaq allows resource and computation sharing among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and devices.

The most compelling aspect of Qwaq is that it creates new collaboration possibilities and methods.

Learning Collaboration from Toyota

There is something missing from the innumerable stories about Toyota that fill the pages of newspapers, business magazines and leadership journals. Rarely do these stories mention one of the key reasons for Toyota’s success: collaboration.

In researching The Culture of Collaboration book, I visited Toyota facilities and explored how collaboration has created substantial value for Toyota and other leading organizations. I had discussions with people throughout the company including Japan-based executives, U.S.-based executives, plant managers, learning and development people, and team members who assemble cars. The book describes how Toyota, among other companies, elegantly extends its collaborative culture through tools including videoconferencing and product lifecycle management.

Mike Morrison, dean of the University of Toyota, provided valuable perspective on many issues including how cross-functional collaboration enhances product development and manufacturing. Mike is quoted in a story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Toyota University Opens Admissions to Outsiders.” Based in Gardena, California, the University trains Toyota employees in its business philosophy and instills principles including nemawashi (consensus-building), kaizen (continuous improvement) and yokoten (moving knowledge around the organization).

One of the University of Toyota’s clients is the Los Angeles Police Department’s jails, according to the story. And what better test of how to turn a command-and-control culture into a collaborative one! The relationship reportedly began after Mike volunteered to help at an officer training meeting. Subsequently, the University of Toyota helped the LA jails team develop breakthrough solutions to several persistent problems.  If police supervisors can become collaborative, perhaps even the most hierarchical, star-oriented corporate culture can shift to the Culture of Collaboration.

Presence, Collaboration and Jeff Raikes' Prediction

Connecting with people can be complicated. We’ve all used the shotgun approach of calling multiple phone numbers, and we’ve all experienced overflowing voice mail boxes and lost email. What a waste of time and energy for people and lost productivity for companies!

Presence is the ability of a person or device to communicate with others and to display levels of availability. IM has introduced us to presence. From buddy lists, we can see whether colleagues and others are available. Now devices from videoconferencing systems to phones are becoming presence-enabled along with business productivity software and enterprise applications including customer relationship management (CRM). Presence is a key collaboration enabler, because we can easily view the availability of colleagues and connect in real time using text, voice or video as appropriate.

Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes predicted yesterday that within three years more than 100 million people will be able to make phone calls from Microsoft Office applications including Word, Outlook and SharePoint. The idea is to let us break free from “voice mail jail and telephone tag.” Raikes also announced that Microsoft will begin public beta testing later this month of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. 

Incidentally, Jeff provided a back-cover quote for The Culture of Collaboration book. How enterprises can create value through presence-enabled applications and devices is a theme that comes up repeatedly in my book.

BMW Collaboration with DaimlerChrysler

Collaboration creates value internally, with business partners, and sometimes with competitors. But how do we know whether collaborating with competitors makes sense? One test is whether collaboration saves money for everybody involved without risking marketplace position or advantage.

BMW and DaimlerChrysler are expanding their collaboration on developing hybrid drive systems. The collaboration, described in a story in Reliable Plant Magazine, will let the two companies achieve increased efficiency through economies of scale. The plan is to accelerate commercialization. Since each company will adapt the components in different ways to complement each brand, the deal is considered win/win. 

BMW has a long and rich commitment to collaboration. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, BMW figured out how to integrate collaborative tools and culture into its operations long before many other companies. Telecooperation is the word BMW has used to describe the marriage of collaborative tools and culture in a globally-distributed design and manufacturing environment. And the X5 was the first vehicle built entirely through telecooperation. In 1999, the company invited me to visit its design center in Munich. I witnessed then how engineers in Munich were successfully collaborating with counterparts in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Some months later, the physical representation of their collaboration, the X5, rolled off the line.

Whether collaboration is internal or external, the marriage of tools and culture can create awesome value.