The Culture of Collaboration

Networking and Collaboration

Networking with people who share your interests is often the first step to effective cross-organizational collaboration, but staying in touch with people after conferences and trade shows is by no means automatic. The first step is a system that makes contacting people easy. I have blogged extensively about presence, which is the ability of a person or device to communicate with others and display levels of availability. IM has introduced us to presence. But what about people we meet at conferences whose information is on business cards rather than in a database? Echoing the classic 1995 book Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, it’s a challenge of turning atoms into usable bits.

I attend many conferences, and I usually end up with a pocket full of business cards, some with notes on the back about conversations and follow-up items. While I make and receive calls and exchange email with some of these contacts, I rarely find the time to manually enter the information from every business card into my contact database. There is, however, an effective solution.

I’ve been using an incredibly-useful product that automates business card data entry. CardScan Team combines simple and intuitive contact management software and a sleek business card scanner with the ability to share the database with colleagues on a network. I scanned a stack of cards, one after the next, and processed the pile in a couple of minutes. CardScan Team efficiently recognized name, email, phone numbers, fax, address, URL and other information and placed it in the right fields instantly. The software is smart enough to know that there are many ways people indicate phone numbers on cards including “p” or “tel.”

I assigned a customized category with the name of the conference so that I could easily query the database for all of the contacts I met at that venue. CardScan Team displays the front of each business card and provides the option of scanning the back. The software also enables users to export the data to Microsoft Outlook. CardScan Team had trouble with only one card in my stack that displayed some fiery red text, but the software let me easily make a couple of quick changes to the data. CardScan Team, which costs $399.99, synchronizes with mobile devices. The product also includes secure data back-up and password-protected access to that data via a browser.

CardScan Team enhances collaboration by letting us share contact information with colleagues in real time and by dramatically decreasing the time and hassle factor involved in keeping in touch.

Creating Wealth Collaboratively

Collaboration is central to creating wealth. Contrary to the myth our star culture perpetuates, people working collaboratively achieve greater success than individuals. While some individuals may walk away with the lion’s share of the spoils, it takes a village to create their wealth. I’m glad that in his excellent page-one story in today’s New York Times headlined “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age” Louis Uchitelle includes steel baron Andrew Carnegie’s philosophy of wealth creation. You can read the story here.

The story compares Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other billionaires with the super wealthy of yesteryear. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is that it quotes David Nasaw, author of the book Andrew Carnegie as saying that Carnegie believed “individuals do not create wealth by themselves.” This, according to Nasaw, was fundamental to Carnegie’s gospel of wealth. In Carnegie’s view, the community creates wealth and individuals like him are simply trustees of wealth. Therefore, Carnegie gave most of his wealth back to the community in the form of libraries, museums, cultural centers and foundations.

Carnegie’s philosophy applies today to how companies create value. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, companies in a variety of industries are achieving impressive results through collaboration. Among the organizations included in the book are Toyota, Boeing, The Dow Chemical Company, BMW, Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks Animation, Mayo Clinic, and the Myelin Repair Foundation. In each of these organizations, star culture takes a back seat to collaborative culture.

Collaboration Produces First Boeing 787 Dreamliner

On Sunday, Boeing unveiled its first 787 Dreamliner at the company’s final assembly plant in Everett, Washington. With former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw hosting the festivities, Boeing broadcasted and webcasted the event in nine languages to more than 45 countries. Boeing Commercial Airplanes VP and GM Mike Bair made an important remark for those of us interested in collaboration: "I am so proud of the men and women of Boeing and of our partner employees in the 70 companies that have brought this airplane to the passengers of the world."

Bair’s reference to “partner employees” is significant in that Boeing is moving away from designing and manufacturing planes by itself. Instead the company is becoming a large-scale systems integrator and collaborating with global partners to produce the 787 Dreamliner and other planes. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe the 3 levels of collaboration at Boeing and how CIO Scott Griffin and Sergey Kravchenko, president of Boeing Russia, worked together to create a real-time collaborative design environment and the culture to support it. The environment, culture and tools that Griffin and Kravchenko have implemented have helped create a more efficient and profitable business model for Boeing. 

The book uses Boeing as a model for the global collaborative enterprise (GCE), which I define as “a collection of interdependent companies that engage in shared creation of value, often in real time.” The partner employees to which Mike Bair refers are the collaborators who comprise Boeing’s GCE. While more and more companies are collaborating internally, very few are in the same league with Boeing when it comes to collaborating with business partners.