The Culture of Collaboration

Pope Francis Promotes Collaborative Structure

The least collaborative organization is changing its structure.

Which organization? Well, here are some of its characteristics. This global enterprise pays a few people to make decisions while everybody else follows orders. The CEO’s direct reports act like a royal court and compete for face time. Senior leaders often live lavishly and consume conspicuously. Headquarters micromanages satellite offices. Bureaucracy and formality reduce efficiency.  Internal competition runs rampant. The command-and-control organizational structure quashes dissent.

Sound familiar? This description fits many global corporations and government entities. This particular multinational spent $170 billion in the United States in 2010, according to The Economist. The organization is the Catholic Church and, more specifically, the Roman Curia, the church’s centralized administrative operation.

Like many corporations, the Catholic Church suffers from an obsolete organizational structure that is compromising value. And like many corporations, reform-minded leaders have tried introducing a new approach. But entrenched interests and a centralized bureaucracy rife with intrigue, fiefdoms, and Machiavellian motivations has frequently derailed change.

Enter Pope Francis setting the stage for change by wearing a simple white robe and black shoes rather than the regal vestments and ruby shoes of his predecessor. He has washed the feet of inmates and has opted to live in a guest quarters rather than the Vatican’s deluxe papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace. There are signs the Pope’s frugal tone is rippling across the Church. In March, the Pope accepted the resignation of Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg, Germany who spent the equivalent of $43 million on a new house and office complex.  In April, the Atlanta Archdiocese announced that it would sell Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s $2.2 million mansion.

Beyond Pope Francis’ rejection of the trappings of office, he is taking steps to adopt a more collaborative structure in the Roman Curia and in the global Catholic Church. The Pope has chosen a “working group” of eight cardinals from outside the Curia to collaborate with him on changing the structure.

Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio heads the Vatican department that writes the church laws that will codify reforms. The Religion News Service quotes Cardinal Coccopalmerio as saying “The big change is the emphasis on collegiality, on collaboration.” Now Pope Francis, Cardinal Cocopalmerio and other new church leaders are focused on breaking down barriers among silos so that information flows around the organization rather than from top to bottom. Cardinal Cocopalmerio has proposed naming a “moderator of the Curia” to identify inefficiencies and cut through red tape.

Pope Francis participates in meetings without dominating them and embraces broad input. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C. recently attended one such meeting at the Vatican about appointing new bishops. Typically, popes never attend such meetings. Pope Francis reportedly stayed for three hours. “We’re all sitting around the table, and he comes in and pulls up a chair,” Cardinal Wuerl told Fox News.  At another similar meeting, a senior cardinal asked the Pope what he thought about the topic. “If I told you what I think, you would all agree,” Pope Francis responded according to Cardinal Wuerl. “I want to hear from you what you think.”

Perhaps most significantly, according to Cardinal Wuerl, the Pope has repeatedly advocated a collaborative process through which “the Holy Spirit can be heard.”  And the Holy Spirit isn’t going to be heard if just one person speaks. “He wants all of us to be speaking with him so at the end of the day he can say this truly was the fruit of the work of the Spirit.”

Hallelujah. Many corporations in multiple industries including United States government agencies can learn from the Pope’s example. It takes more than window dressing and a desire for change to create value through collaboration.  The only viable approach is changing the organizational structure which, in turn, shifts the culture. My research on collaboration indicates that changing the structure requires seven steps—plan, people, principles, practices, processes, planet and payoff. Pope Francis has demonstrated that making progress through these steps requires that a leader set the stage for change so that others feel comfortable participating.

In essence, The Bounty Effect has hit the Catholic Church. The Bounty Effect happens when exigent circumstances compel companies, governments and organizations to change their structures from command-and-control to collaborative. For the Catholic Church, exigent circumstances range from sexual abuse scandals to corruption and cronyism at the Vatican. And it’s The Bounty Effect that led to the election of Pope Francis and the structural change now underway.

Rank and Yank or Differentiation?

Sometimes corporate speak or shop talk migrates from cubicles to the front page. This is exactly what happened to the terms “performance review” and “performance appraisal” last November. That’s when Microsoft eliminated its so-called “stack ranking” of team members.

Last spring, Microsoft Chairman and co-founder Bill Gates read an advanced copy of The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. The book shows how to change organizational structures from Industrial Age command-and-control to Information Age collaborative. Regarding performance reviews, The Bounty Effect demonstrates why ranking team members falls short and how a Collaborative Reward System creates greater value than an internally-competitive system. Ranking is essentially grading on a curve, because the organization often pre-determines which percentage of its workforce must fall into categories such as below target, target, above target and significantly above target. And grading on a curve fosters internal competition rather than collaboration. How encouraged are team members to share information and ideas if they must compete with colleagues for rankings? Not very. More likely, people will try to fake collaboration.

Headlines regarding Microsoft’s shift include “Stack Ranking Falls Outs of Favor” in Computerworld and “Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stack Rankings” in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Within several days of Microsoft’s elimination of stack ranking, I was on a flight from Taipei to San Francisco reading The Wall Street Journal Asia edition. And I was fascinated to see a condemnation of Microsoft’s shift and a defense of ranking team members from Jack Welch, who once was CEO of a company known for using what Welch calls “differentiation.” That company is General Electric.

Here’s how Welch describes differentiation: “It’s about building great teams and great companies through consistency, transparency and candor. It’s about aligning performance with the organization’s mission and values. It’s about making sure that all employees know where they stand. Differentiation is nuanced, humane and occasionally complex, and it has been used successfully by companies for decades.”

In The Culture of Collaboration® book, I describe “differentiation and affirmation.” The process is more commonly called “rank and yank,” a term that Welch considers “media-invented” and “politicized.”  One company that adopted the approach and created a star culture was Enron, which went bankrupt for many reasons.  Star culture is a hallmark of the Industrial Age command-and-control organization. Such organizations pit people against one another and hidden agendas multiply. In contrast, a collaborative organization encourages team members to work in concert towards common goals.

Welch seems to endorse star culture in describing “feedback and coaching” as one component that makes “differentiation” work. “Your stars know they are loved and rarely leave. Those in the middle 70% know that they are appreciated, and they receive clear guidance about how to improve their performance. And the bottom 10% is never surprised when the conversation sometimes turns, after a year of candid appraisals, to moving on,” according to Welch.

Further, Welch endorses the “bell-curve” grading aspect of “differentiation.” “We grade children in school, often as young as 9 or 10, and no one calls that cruel. But somehow adults can’t take it? Explain that one to me.” Well, here it goes, Jack. Curve grading is no more helpful to children in school than it is to organizations. Our educational systems, particularly in the United States, too often foster unnecessary competition rather than collaboration. It’s no wonder why corporations have difficulty migrating from command-and-control to collaboration. Part of the reason is that team members competed for grades in school, competed for graduate school admissions while in college, and then competed for limited grant money and fellowships while in graduate school. In particular, law schools often grade first-year students on a curve in part to limit merit scholarship awards. Eliminating curve grading in which a fixed percentage must fail is a major step towards reducing internal competition and curbing the “star culture” that complicates collaboration.

Ranking team members is part of the broader recognition and reward process. This process typically features performance reviews, which distract organizations and waste an incredible amount of time. The Bounty Effect describes how to replace performance reviews with a far more collaborative approach. Whether we call ranking team members “differentiation” or “rank and yank,” this Industrial Age command-and-control approach has no place in an Information Age collaborative organization.

 

Clinton Foundation Collaborates to Improve Health

Collaborating across sectors—government, private industry, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and education—can solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. These challenges include global health, economic inequality, childhood obesity, climate change, and health and wellness—which, incidentally, are the five main areas in which the William J. Clinton Foundation works.

Health and wellness was front and center last Tuesday as President Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, assembled a few hundred people in the California desert for the Clinton Foundation’s Health Matters conference. Despite the focus, themes are interrelated. So global health, economic inequality, and childhood obesity crept into the discussion. In his opening remarks, President Clinton noted that the rising cost of health insurance premiums often prevents employers from increasing wages. “We cannot ignore the link between health and the economy,” said President Clinton.

 

Invited guests and speakers at the La Quinta Resort in La Quinta, California included hospital and insurance executives, health policy experts, and veterans of government service including Dr. David Satcher, Surgeon General of the United States during the Clinton Administration. Others including Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Dean Ornish, and actress Barbra Streisand are partnering with the Clinton Foundation to advance health and wellness agendas. Long-standing relationships among some participants coupled with the relaxed resort atmosphere sparked an exchange of actionable ideas. President Clinton and Chelsea seemed as comfortable sitting in the audience asking questions and refining ideas as they were on stage.

“We’re moving into an era where the only way you can create enough jobs for people and generate enough wealth to have decently-rising wages is if you have creative networks of cooperation. I think the same thing is true of this health challenge,” President Clinton insisted during a discussion with NBC News Chief Medical Correspondent Nancy Snyderman, a friend of the former president for thirty years. “It’s the only thing that works. It works everywhere in the world.” This is another way of saying that collaboration creates value.

I practically muttered “Amen” aloud when President Clinton cited a study that found that if you put a group of people with average IQs together and ask them to work on a problem for a year and you give the same problem to a genius, over the long run the group of people with average intelligence working together will do better than one genius acting alone.

One of the most impactful ways that collaboration can improve healthcare is to remove the barriers that exist between front-line doctors and other health professionals. Too often primary care doctors practice in silos. Dr. Mark Weissman rose from the audience to insist that he and other primary care doctors are awash in patient data but lack regular access to other medical professionals who can collaborate with them on the data and on patient care. Pediatrician Donald Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a possible candidate for governor of Massachusetts, responded to Weissman that it’s necessary for doctors to learn that “I’m no longer the hero who saves the day, but I’m interdependent with others to give care. That’s what works.”

I’ve written often in this space and in The Culture of Collaboration book about how engaged team members working in a collaborative culture create far more value than do team members working in a culture of fear and internal competition.  Dr. Deepak Chopra noted that employee disengagement costs the United States economy $300 billion a year. “If your supervisor ignores you, you start to get disengaged and within a few months you start to get ill,” Chopra explained. “If your supervisor doesn’t ignore you but criticizes you, you actually get better.” This is because we would rather be acknowledged than ignored even if we’re receiving criticism. “And if your supervisor notices a single strength that you have, your rate of disengagement goes down to 1 percent,” according to Chopra.

The Health Matters conference is as much about taking action as about exchanging ideas. Corporations, government entities, non-profit organizations, and individuals pledged to take action in preventing disease and improving health. Financial pledges total over $100 million. One such pledge by entrepreneur and philanthropist Vinod Gupta will support a new Clinton Foundation program to address prescription drug abuse. Gupta’s son, Benjamin, died accidentally after taking prescription painkillers and consuming alcohol in December of 2011. Gupta and the Clinton Foundation will educate the public, particularly college students, about the dangers of prescription painkillers.

As I was checking out of the La Quinta Resort, I noticed that Surgeon General Satcher was next to me in line. We chatted about his recent work guiding the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. Dr. Satcher noted that at Morehouse he’s building on his work as surgeon general by collaboratively focusing on neglected diseases and underserved populations. Like so many other disciplines, improving health and wellness requires collaboration.

Cross-Sector Collaboration for Sustainable Development

Accomplishing massive goals requires massive collaboration—far beyond collaborating within an organization or within an industry or among government agencies.

Making meaningful progress on issues including eradicating global poverty and protecting the global ecosystem requires collaboration among governments, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), private industry, farmers, indigenous peoples and unaffiliated individuals with ideas. This cross-sector collaboration is driving the agenda for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development which happens this June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference, dubbed Rio+20, marks the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The 1992 conference established the Rio Declaration, which includes 27 principles mostly addressing sustainable economic development.

Last Friday, at the invitation of the United States Department of State, I attended a planning meeting for Rio+20 at the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The purpose was to distill ideas from cross-sector collaborators on how to bridge connection technologies with sustainable development. In a brainstorming session on “sustainable economic growth,” we tackled wasted talent and connectivity.  Think of the many people in developing countries with talent and ideas who have no outlet to connect and collaborate. This is our collective loss as global citizens until we tap that talent.

The world’s wasting of talent in developing countries is analogous to the command-and-control organization that pays “knowledge workers” to think and pays everybody else to carry out orders. See my January 11, 2011 column for BusinessWeek.com on this topic. Such an organization squanders talent. This is because people throughout the organization—from the loading dock to the call center—have knowledge to contribute.

One participant noted that wasted connectivity involves using the Internet frivolously, perhaps for pirating movies and other content, rather than for working together to eradicate poverty, create new markets and protect the environment. Similarly, wasted connectivity within organizations involves using networks and tools for chatter rather than for developing and producing products and services.

Since the 1992 Rio Declaration, the Internet has grown from less than 16 million users to over 2 billion users, according to internetworldstats.com. Mobile phone users have grown from less than 23 million in 1992 to more than 6 billion in 2011, according to nationmaster.com. The current level of connectivity creates an opportunity for a more distributed, peer-to-peer (read inclusive) approach in collaborating for sustainable development. 

Old models of cross-sector collaboration were minimally effective, because they involved “decision makers” or “thought leaders” shaping ideas and developing solutions which they would hand down to people impacted by the decisions. Now people in developing countries without affiliations can shape ideas with ministers and private sector leaders globally. Well, at least this is technically possible.

As important to cross-sector collaboration as global connectivity and enabling technologies is a cultural shift in which governments, NGO’s and private industry embrace input from people regardless of affiliation or location. This is analogous to organizations adopting more collaborative cultures and tools so that people far from the home office or from executive corridors can participate in making decisions. The State Department has chalked up success with an emerging collaborative culture and tools including Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board. For more on this, see my September 14, 2010 post.

One of the people hashing out ideas in the sustainable development brainstorming session was Rio+20 Secretary General Sha Zukang, who is also the UN Under Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs. Zukang, who demonstrated particular talent at defining and outlining sustainable development issues, brushed against a live wire as the workshop concluded: intellectual property. The brainstorm was exactly three weeks after the collapse of U.S. House of Representatives support for the Stop Online Privacy Act and Senate support for the PROTECT IP Act backed by media and entertainment companies and opposed by Google and Wikipedia among other online interests.

Zukang described the need to “find a balance” between protecting intellectual property and disseminating information. This balance impacts cross-sector collaboration in that people in developing countries often lack access to the same information accessible to their collaborators in developed countries. Providing affordable access will help level the playing field. Contrary to some viewpoints, collaboration—cross-sector or otherwise—by no means requires eliminating or dismantling intellectual property protection. IP protection creates incentives for people and organizations to collaboratively develop and produce products and services.

Cross-sector collaboration takes collaboration beyond organizational and sector boundaries to create value on a global scale.

Incenting the Intelligence Community to Collaborate

Instilling collaborative organizational culture often requires changing the recognition and reward system. But internally-competitive entrenched interests will undoubtedly resist changes to how the organization pays and promotes people. Also expect resistance from people who believe there’s no reason to incent people, because they should do as they’re told.

 

Tuesday, during James Clapper’s confirmation hearing as director of national intelligence, Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) asked Clapper why it’s necessary to incent the intelligence community to collaborate. Levin was referring to Clapper’s pre-hearing questionnaire in which he apparently wrote that, if confirmed, he would achieve progress in information sharing by the “disciplined application” of incentives—both rewards and consequences. “Why do we need incentives,” Levin asked “Why don’t we just need a directive from the President by executive order, for instance? Otherwise, why do we need incentives, rewards and consequences?”

 

Clapper responded, “One way of inducing change in culture is to provide rewards for those who collaborate and, I suppose, penalties for those who don’t.” He added, “And obviously directives are effective too.” You can watch Levin’s questions and Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Community on C-SPAN here (counter 1:37:06). Incidentally, collaborative organizations achieve more with the carrot than the stick. Penalties for failure to collaborate are anti-collaborative in that they spread fear. Instead, reward and recognize collaborators; then others will get the message and start changing their behavior.

 

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the intelligence community has struggled to shift from a culture of competition and information hoarding among agencies to a collaborative culture in which people share data and information. For background on this, see my December 30, 2009 post. I have advised senior leaders of the intelligence community about the transition. On the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I gave a speech to the community sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

 

In the speech, I highlighted four areas. One was aligning recognition and reward systems to encourage collaboration. ODNI, the entity formed after September 11, has been driving collaboration among the sixteen agencies that comprise the intelligence community. Some agencies have balked, ostensibly for security reasons, about sharing their data across the community. While security concerns are valid, perceived loss of control and inter-agency rivalry also play a role.

 

The leaders whom I’ve advised implicitly understand the value of collaboration in developing better intelligence and thwarting terrorists. They also understand institutional resistance. James Clapper currently serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and formerly served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). This multi-agency intelligence background gives Clapper an advantage in guiding the shift in the intelligence community’s culture in that an insider committed to change has more credibility than an outsider does. Clapper must draw on his alliances and relationships across the community to help break down barriers among agencies and adopt collaborative culture.  

The Much-Maligned Meeting and Collaboration

The “M” word creates more outbursts of opinion than practically any other word in business.

 

I’m referring to the word meeting. Almost everybody has a—usually negative—gut reaction to the notion of meetings. Plenty of people would prefer being stuck on a tarmac than stuck in a meeting. Even though water and snacks are often available at meetings, our time belongs to others. On the tarmac, there’s no guarantee of refreshments, but at least our time is our own. In fact, meeting-bashing has become welcome break-room conversation.

 

Nevertheless, technology vendors have invested huge resources in meetings. So, it’s not just employers who want to load up our schedules with meetings. There are vendors with vested interests in making meetings even more integral to our work than they are now.

 

Last night on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Larry asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates his opinion of the Apple iPad. Gates responded, “We’re all trying to get to something that you just have to take to a meeting and use.” He added, “It still isn’t the device that I would take to a meeting, because it just has no input.” You can view the video clip here. So, one way Bill gauges the effectiveness of the iPad and similar devices is whether we will want to take them to a meeting. Bill—and by inference, Microsoft—apparently remains focused on keeping us in meetings. In reality, it’s more important whether the iPad and any similar device fits into our lifestyles and work styles than whether we’ll want to bring it to meetings.

 

Are meetings collaborative? There’s nothing inherently collaborative about an in-person or virtual meeting. That’s right. Using virtual meeting tools is no guarantee that we’re collaborating. Joining a web conference, using telepresence or IMing the day away creates little value unless these tools fit into collaborative organizational culture and practices.

 

If we compete with colleagues and our teams and organizations reflect “star culture”, do the tools we use make us collaborative? No. It takes more than tools to make collaboration happen. If we fill our ranks with millennials and send them to meetings with devices loaded with collaborative capabilities, will those meetings automatically become collaborative? Don’t bet on it.

 

The biggest beef about meetings is that they’re a waste of time. In other words, they fail to create value. If we come together as a group and we’re working together to create value, we’re collaborating. So, we’ve essentially transcended the notion of a meeting and instead we’re in a collaborative session. Organizations and vendors should seek to remake meetings as collaborative sessions.

 

In the final chapter of The Culture of Collaboration book, I note that “Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.” As collaborating in the same room starts seeming awkward, that’s the new frontier. But organizations and technology vendors take note: it’s about creating more value through collaboration rather than better meetings.

It Takes More Than Sharing Information to Prevent Terrorist Attacks

More than eight years after lack of collaboration among intelligence agencies contributed to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency is facing new allegations that it failed to share vital information that could have thwarted last week’s attempted bomb attack on Northwest flight 253.  

President Obama yesterday scolded the United States Intelligence Community for “a systemic failure” because intelligence agencies apparently never shared all of their information about the suspect before he boarded the plane and was ultimately subdued by passengers. The National Security Agency reportedly had information that Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen were preparing a Nigerian to commit a terrorist attack against the United States. And the Central Intelligence Agency had reportedly met with the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , the suspect, at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. The suspect’s father apparently informed the CIA of his son’s radicalization. Had there been greater collaboration among agencies, President Obama has said that the suspect’s name would have appeared on the so-called No Fly List, which likely would have prevented him from boarding the Northwest plane.

 

According to the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal, officials of the National Counterterrorism Center which acts as a clearinghouse for terrorism data, have indicated that the CIA failed to share all of its information with other agencies.

 

The problem is that terrorists are often highly collaborative, but the Intelligence Community has lagged behind in embracing collaboration. The 911 Commission Report recommended a reorganization of the 16-agency Intelligence Community under a Director of National Intelligence. The report also recommended increased information sharing among agencies to thwart future attacks. Subsequently, President Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Counterterrorism Center, and called for “open-source intelligence.” In 2007, ODNI implemented a 100-day plan and a 500-day plan for Integration and Collaboration among agencies.

 

As part of the new commitment to collaboration, the Intelligence Community adopted A-Space, modeled after MySpace and Facebook, so that analysts could share information across agencies. The community has also adopted Intellipedia, a cross-agency wiki.

 

On the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I gave a speech to the Intelligence Community. The speech was sponsored and hosted by ODNI. In the speech and during subsequent meetings with senior intelligence officials, I insisted that it would take much more than tools and a top-down collaboration initiative for the Intelligence Community to actually collaborate. Our research at The Culture of Collaboration® Institute indicates that in any organization, people may buy into collaboration as a concept, but in practice it’s a totally different story. Therefore, reducing fear of collaboration and changing behavior are crucial to cultural shift.

 

Clearly, intelligence requires protecting classified information just as corporations must protect trade secrets. But aside from keeping outsiders from obtaining information, many career intelligence officers have been conditioned to embrace secrecy within their community. This fosters information hoarding, intra-agency rivalry and intelligence failures. It takes more than new tools and technologies and more than even an act of Congress to abandon this deeply-engrained conditioning.

 

Sharing information among agencies is undoubtedly necessary, but thwarting attacks requires much more. Even if agencies make information available to one another, people need to know how to act on that information.  Therefore, I will reiterate here two major points on which I’ve counseled senior intelligence officials:

 

1) Favor on-the-fly decisions over chain-of-command decisions.

2) Encourage spontaneous interaction over scheduled encounters and meetings

 

The White House and intelligence officials can talk ad nauseam about sharing information. If, however, analysts and other intelligence personnel are expected to run decisions “up the flagpole” and are inclined to schedule meetings rather than connect with colleagues and hash out issues on the fly, it will remain difficult to thwart attacks.

 

As I noted in The Culture of Collaboration book, "the in-box culture is dead." And if asynchronous information sharing persists without the necessary real-time cultural components, intelligence failures will continue. The cultural shift necessary to prevent security lapses like the one aboard Northwest flight 253 involves moving beyond information and data sharing—and embracing real-time collaboration.

Telehealth Revisited

Telehealth is back on radar screens of policy makers, health care professionals, engineers and marketers. As we rethink healthcare economics and delivery systems, technology advances are enabling new approaches and better execution of old approaches. Telehealth can enable healthcare access for underserved populations including rural areas, inner city areas, isolated regions, developing countries, and prisons.

 

 Telepresence creates new opportunities for virtual consultations to approximate face-to-face encounters between providers and patients and among providers. Tandberg and Polycom, established vendors in  telehealth, now offer telepresence for healthcare. Polycom announced last month at the American Telemedicine Association 14th Annual Meeting and Exposition that the Michigan Department of Corrections is using Polycom telepresence for everything from tele-psychiatry to tele-nephrology.  Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group has developed HealthPresence, which combines Cisco TelePresence with patient health data captured by connected medical devices such as stethoscopes and vital signs monitors.

 

In the late 1990’s, I conducted research in telehealth and wrote the “Personal Telemedicine” column for Telemedicine Today magazine. The magazine allowed me to write about every aspect of telehealth with an emphasis on how the tools and delivery mechanisms impact people. The name of the column played off my first book, Personal Videoconferencing (Manning/Prentice Hall, 1996). Since many of the telehealth topics I researched then are now re-emerging, I’ll share one column that’s still available online. It’s called "Twenty Minutes in the Life of a Tele-Home Health Nurse," which appeared in the December, 1997 issue of Telemedicine Today. You can read the column here.

Collaboration at Fortune Brainstorm: Green

I came away from the Fortune Brainstorm: Green summit in Laguna Niguel, California convinced that collaboration and sustainability are inextricably linked. Collaboration connects us with a broader ecosystem that creates value for our businesses and also—in a broader sense—for the planet.

 

Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer, conference chair Marc Gunther and their colleagues created a thoughtful, compelling forum in which participants not only exchanged ideas but also developed solutions together on the fly. In other words, people were collaborating and creating value.  

 

Informality is key to getting collaborative juices flowing, and the relaxed physical environment helped. The conference room at the Ritz Carlton featured Herman Miller Aeron chairs and coffee tables with small, sleek monitors on which participants could view close-ups of speakers.

 

Here are some highlights of the conference:

 

Traceability in the supply chain is good for business. That was the consensus of a break-out session in which Arlin Wasserman, vice president of corporate citizenship of Sodexo, Inc., the food service and facilities management company, noted that we need a “massive reinvention of traceability and transparency” in supply chains. Jill Dumain of Patagonia discussed how her company’s web site reveals both the good and the bad. Check out Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles here. Now that’s transparency!

 

Wal-Mart is collaborating with suppliers on a “360 scorecard” detailing social and environmental footprints of products. Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs and government relations, insisted that this effort could affect thousands of products. He also indicated that Wal-Mart would build sustainability into every buyer’s job description.

 

Fear of being accused of “green washing” has prevented Tiffany CEO Michael Kowalski from participating in any environmental conference until now. Kowalski described Tiffany & Co.’s efforts over the last decade to short-circuit the trade in “blood diamonds,” which are often mined by slaves controlled by militias and used to finance wars. Tiffany has reportedly removed blood diamonds from its supply chain by focusing on traceability and transparency. Tiffany can now identify the mined source of fifty percent of its products, according to Kowalski.

 

Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, noted that he has focused on protecting research and development dollars, despite the downturn. This is clearly a longer-term view that’s critical to creating value through collaboration. As I explained in my book, The Culture of Collaboration, Ford has highly-collaborative pockets. Its challenge is to leverage those collaborative pockets to adopt an enterprise-wide collaborative culture. When Bill Ford joined the Ford board in 1988, he was told that he needed to stop associating with “known environmentalists.” Guess he’s having the last laugh considering the growing realization that green initiatives create value.

 

Peter Darbee, President and CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, challenged the state and federal governments to collaborate with utilities in transforming the economy. At the onset of World War Two, the United States migrated from a peace to war-time economy within two years. “We need to do that,” Darbee insisted. “The government needs to get out of the way,” and streamline the permit process so that utilities can build transmission lines in two years instead of eight or ten.

 

Jeffrey Hollender, president and “chief inspired protagonist” of Seventh Generation, challenged participants to create products and services that “restore the Earth rather than being less bad.” He insisted that manufacturers should consider the entire lifecycle of products.

 

In an incredible story of collaborative leadership, Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, described how he reached out to union leaders after learning of a 6-day sit-in by workers at the shuddered Republic  Windows and Doors plant in Chicago. Rather than waiting to buy assets through the bankruptcy court, he proactively engaged the people who make windows and listened to their concerns. Serious Materials, which manufactures windows which Surace says are 400 percent more efficient than dual pane windows, ultimately bought the plant for $1.45 million and rehired the 250 laid-off workers.

 

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton delivered the conference’s closing keynote with a call to action that federal and state governments and private industry move beyond policy talks and “operationalize” energy efficiency, carbon reduction and other green initiatives.  He mentioned two particularly interesting initiatives that the Clinton Global Initiative is enabling in collaboration with private industry.  

 

Project 2 Degrees developed with Microsoft and others provides online tools that let cities establish a baseline for greenhouse gas emissions, create action plans, track successes for emissions reduction, and share experiences.  Cisco  is investing $15 million to reduce traffic congestion in cities through its Connected Urban Development Program, which uses information and communications technology to monitor emissions. 

 

 “What we don’t have is enough information sharing in real time,” President Clinton insisted.  Real-time information sharing is key to collaboration whether we’re reducing emissions or developing products. So the discussion of green initiatives comes full circle to spontaneous, on-the-fly collaboration.  I make the case in my book that the quest for value creation has forced the deserialization of work. The need for real-time information sharing is further evidence that sustainability and collaboration are joined at the hip.

 

Collaborating out of the Downturn Focus of Blog Talk Radio Interview

I discussed collaboration with Zane Safrit yesterday morning on his hour-long Blog Talk Radio show. You can listen to the show here.

 

When he was CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, Zane masterfully used blogging as a marketing and business tool. His small company, based in a rural Iowa community, adopted collaborative culture and tools as an advantage in a marketplace saturated with large players. Zane is a super-capable, collaborative leader.

 

Our conversation ranged from common denominators and motivators for companies wanting to adopt collaborative culture and the biggest mistakes companies make. We also discussed the need to replace star-oriented culture and the role of collaboration in an economic recovery.

 

Zane asked me how companies can balance the need for collaboration with the need for consistency, routines and procedures. It’s a thoughtful question that organizations should consider. I explained that it’s necessary to include collaboration in policies and procedures, so that people are consistently collaborative J.

 

Towards the end of the show, we focused more on the economy. Zane asked me about the biggest trends regarding collaborative culture over the next two years. Here’s what I said:

 

People are going to realize what collaboration is and what it isn’t, and I absolutely believe that collaboration will help deliver us from the downturn. We need to abandon the herd mentality. I blogged about this on March 15, 2009 with a call to action. You can read the post here.

 

There’s a misconception that collaboration is about running with the herd. Real collaboration involves constructive confrontation….coming together to hash out issues, make decisions, improve processes and develop products and services. And it’s much broader than companies. It’s about governments collaborating across agencies and departments, with citizens and with other governments. It’s about people working together to create value in our communities.

 

It’s about changing education so that we’re developing collaborators. The more educated people are, the more competitive they are. Our educational system beats collaboration out of us. That’s changing.

 

I’ve lived and worked in smaller communities where many people get jobs right out of high school. They’re used to working together to cook dinner at the VFW or help neighbors repair tornado damage. It’s this type of attitude that we need to nourish in our country, in higher education, in companies, in and among governments. Coming out of this downturn, star culture and internal competition are unaffordable. Collaboration will drive the recovery.

 

“How will that change our economy, culture, country?” Zane asked me.

I responded:

 

It’ll be back to basics…working together to create real value. The mortgage mess, the financial collapse were rooted in artificial value. We gave the keys to the country and the economy to star competitors… the best and the brightest who went to top schools and competed for themselves without considering the bigger picture. Now we need to entrust our companies, governments and communities to collaborators. And we’re going to build long-term, sustainable value.