The Culture of Collaboration

Collaboration Creates Leap in Photo Organizing

Inheriting shoe boxes full of photos presents challenges. You can leave them in the garage or attic gathering dust. You can argue with siblings about who keeps the photos, who scans them, and who shares them electronically with everybody else. You can hire a professional photo organizer. Or you can collaborate with professionals and incorporate their techniques into your system.

That’s what Epson has done. And that collaboration has helped produce the FastFoto FF-640 photo scanning system which Epson is

The Epson FastFoto FF-640 scans and organizes photos. It's the result of collaboration.

releasing today. The system combines what Epson says is a one-photo-per-second photo scanner with image organizing software. Epson’s Jack Rieger demonstrated the system a couple of weeks ago during a pre-launch briefing at San Francisco’s Le Meridien hotel. Rieger described Epson’s collaboration with the Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO). “We took the best of their techniques and embedded them in software,” explained Rieger, a chemical engineer and former film designer and digital product marketer for Kodak. These techniques include file structure and hierarchy for automated sorting of photos, a file naming system, a capture date that reflects the date the photo was taken, and searchable metadata which is the data about the data.

According to the Association of Personal Photo Organizers, 1.7 trillion printed photos “languish in boxes and containers.”  Each month, people take another 10 billion pictures globally resulting in what the association calls “photo chaos.” APPO says it equips its more than 500 members who are independent professionals to “rescue” and organize all these photos.  Now APPO has a new tool color in its palette of organizing tools.

“This is groundbreaking, something that was not possible before,” Rieger insisted. The scanner features a 30-photo auto feeder and scans the front and back of the photo to preserve any writing on the back. The software automatically restores and corrects the color of old photos. Plus the system ties in with frequently-used services including Facebook, Dropbox and Google Drive to enable collaboration among friends and family. So the sibling who inherits the photos can more easily digitize, organize, and share the anthology and collaborate on the collection with other siblings, relatives and friends.

Tools and technologies never create collaboration, but they can enhance and extend collaboration. This is true whether we’re developing a slide show with siblings or producing a product with colleagues. And the Epson FastFoto FF-640, a product developed through collaboration, also enhances collaboration among its users.

Collaborative Chaos at the New York Times

Journalism, at its best, involves constant collaboration.

In television newsrooms, reporters, producers and assignment editors engage in a continuous conversation about stories and often edit scripts together in real time. While real-time group writing is a relatively new phenomenon in education and business, reporters and producers frequently write story introductions and “teases” together. This traditionally involves no electronic screen-sharing or web conferencing, but rather colleagues shouting to one another across the newsroom or two people hunched over a single terminal. In newspaper newsrooms, a similar continuous dialogue occurs among reporters and editors. Some colleagues get to know one another so well that they even finish each other’s sentences.

All of this newsroom interaction requires informality. Corporations and government agencies are increasingly embracing informality, because of a growing realization that formality compromises value creation. But informality is nothing new in newsrooms. The informality of journalism dates back at least to the early 20^th Century when few reporters got “formal” higher education and the socialization that accompanies it. Newsrooms then felt more like police stations in which colleagues sat in an open room exchanging sarcastic, irreverent banter. And though most journalists (and many police) now graduate from college and the journalistic culture has evolved, newsrooms have nevertheless retained much of their informality.

Films about journalism have captured this informality. Examples include the 1931 and 1974 versions of The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, about newspaper reporting in Chicago. Also, the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula, about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal, reveals the constant conversation among all the players in the Post newsroom. The conversation continues down corridors and into the elevator where executive editor Ben Bradlee (played by Jason Robards), in a dramatic moment, instructs Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) to “print it” meaning to run a story about Watergate.

Fast forward to 2011. Traditional journalism is under siege, in part because of the Great Recession’s 
ravages but mostly because of systemic shifts in the media industry. These include shrinking audiences and advertising dollars flowing to Web-based alternatives including social media. Against this backdrop comes Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary directed by Andrew Rossi, which attempts to capture a leading newspaper and its people at a pivotal point. (Photo of Times newsroom above courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

The reviews have been mixed, a charitable adjective for Michael Kinsley’s take on the film that ran in—of all outlets—the New York Times itself. Kinsley takes the documentary to task for flitting “from topic to topic, character to character, explaining almost nothing.” Kinsley suggests that the movie is disjointed and confusing. The film does take up a series of topics: WikiLeaks, the Pentagon Papers, the Times survival, Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal, Twitter’s impact, the Times’ plagiarism scandal involving former reporter Jayson Blair, Iraq, the Apple iPad, and the ups and downs of the Tribune Company, among others.

And all of this comes in the form of a continuous conversation upon which we as the audience eavesdrop. “Like a shopper at the supermarket without a shopping list, “Page One” careens around the aisles picking up this item and that one, ultimately coming home with three jars of peanut butter and no 2-percent milk,” Kinsley writes. Yes, but the collaborative process is rarely pretty.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I identify the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that are typically present when collaboration works. One of these elements is collaborative chaos, which is exactly what Page One reveals. Collaborative chaos, the unstructured exchange of ideas to create value, lets the unexpected happen and generate rich returns. In the film, we see former cocaine addict and current Times media columnist David Carr sharing ideas with his sources, his colleagues and his editor, Bruce Headlam. These exchanges culminate in value creation, Carr’s columns. And the film invites us into the Times daily story conferences during which editors jostle over which articles should appear on the front page.

Kinsley, no stranger to journalism as the former editor of the New Republic and Slate, would undoubtedly argue that while confusion may prevail in newsrooms, it’s the job of the filmmaker to present a more organized picture. But attempting to sanitize or beat the collaborative chaos out of the Times or any news operation would present a distorted view. It would be like eating street food in an upscale setting, a current trend in the restaurant business incidentally.

Journalism, and collaboration itself, involves a continuous conversation during which collaborative chaos prevails, recedes, only to prevail again all the while creating value.

Collaborative Music and Video Production Changing Entertainment Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Ford's New Marketing Head a Star? Plus Keith Richards Provides Collaboration Insight

James Farley is no star, but The New York Times would have us think otherwise. Farley is Ford Motor Company’s new group vice president of marketing and communications. He took the job after spending seventeen years at Toyota, most recently as group vice president and general manager of Lexus.

The Times ran as its business section lead last Sunday a story about Farley headlined “A Star at Toyota, A Believer at Ford.” There is little in the story that would suggest Farley is a star, but the Times nevertheless packaged the story in a way that perpetuates the Myth of the Single Cowboy. This is the notion that one self-sufficient, rugged individual can achieve smashing success without help from anybody. We turn athletes, chefs, surgeons, politicians, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders into stars. The media drives this myth into our living rooms, our organizations and into our consciousness.

In the same edition as the Farley story, the Times travel section's first page promoted a story on French chefs on page 7 as “The New Culinary Stars of Bordeaux.” What about the line cooks, the prep people, the servers and the expeditors? It takes more than a single, star chef to prepare a meal in an upscale restaurant. But the Times and many other media outlets would prefer that we believe one person makes it all happen.

Toyota emphasizes collaboration over star culture. Farley clearly chalked up significant achievements at Toyota, because he collaborated across levels, functions and business units. Rather than practicing shoot-from-the-hip management, Toyota leaders practice nemawashi, which means literally “to prepare a tree’s roots for the soil.” Nemawashi is essentially about getting broad input into decisions and making decisions slowly by consensus. As a star, Farley could never have achieved much at Toyota. As a collaborator, Farley and his colleagues created considerable value.

Over the weekend, I saw the awesome IMAX version of the new Rolling Stones movie, Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the film, Keith Richards discusses his guitar prowess as compared with that of Ron Wood, who shares with Richards the title co-lead guitarist of the Stones. “We’re both pretty lousy, but together we’re better than ten others,” Richards says. This sums up the value of collaboration over star culture.

Apollo 13

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

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

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

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