The Culture of Collaboration

Does Remote Work Reduce Collaboration?

Some companies are eliminating remote work or “telecommuting” because they believe their people must share the same physical space to collaborate.

I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” But apparently some organizations want to get more physical rather than virtual.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, companies including IBM, Aetna, Bank of America, Best Buy and Reddit have ended or reduced remote-work arrangements as managers “demand more collaboration, closer contact with customers—and more control over the workday.”

Companies facing challenges are often the first to scrap or reduce remote work programs. In 2013, as Yahoo was struggling, then CEO Marissa Mayer defended her decision to eliminate work from home. Speaking at the Great Place to Work conference in Los Angeles, Mayer reportedly said “People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.”

No question people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together, but the point is people can be together virtually as well as physically. Many tools and technologies support high-impact virtual collaboration. Forcing people to endure a daily commute and interfering with their life/work balance reinforces command and control and disrupts collaboration and innovation. Also, remote work lets companies tap expertise regardless of geography. And teams are often comprised of people in multiple regions, so forcing people to work from a company location is unlikely to enhance collaboration within a team. It does make sense to encourage remote workers to spend some time at company locations to spark chance encounters in cafeterias, corridors and break rooms with people outside their teams.

Command and control culture is the opposite of collaborative culture so an organization trying to control team members by keeping them at the workplace short circuits collaboration. Ironically, my research interest in collaboration began in the mid-1990s when I was writing a book on personal videoconferencing. Early telecommuting programs experimented with PC-based videoconferencing so that remote workers could look each other in the eye and talk with colleagues while they were collaboratively working on spreadsheets, documents, design plans and other work. The issue then was whether we could collaborate as effectively at a distance as we could in the same room.

By the time I wrote The Culture of Collaboration book, the tools and technologies supporting remote work had become pervasive and the culture supporting virtual collaboration had become widespread. People at many organizations were becoming accustomed to collaborating spontaneously from almost anywhere. So the challenge was changing. I wrote:

“Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.”

This is because same-room collaboration tools were lagging behind those used at a distance and people were becoming more accustomed to collaborating from applications on their notebook and laptop computers. Also, “presence” technology provided the capability to find colleagues, check their availability and begin collaborating with them on the fly from anywhere.

Spontaneity and organizational culture supporting ad hoc encounters is critical to creating value collaboratively. In some cultures, this means it’s okay to grab people out of meetings or interrupt their work for on-the-fly collaboration. But in mature companies walking back remote work, often this level of spontaneity is a cultural faux pas. So the most effective way to spontaneously connect in these cultures is often through online chat which can escalate into a collaborative group session (CGS). Organizations create far greater value by moving away from command and control and instead enabling team members to connect and collaborate spontaneously regardless of physical location.

As I demonstrate in my book The Bounty Effect, exigent circumstances including disruptive market forces, new competitors, or a regional slowdown are opportunities to accelerate collaboration and emerge stronger from the challenge. Eliminating remote work because of a difficult environment rarely enhances collaboration and instead increases command and control. The more effective approach is to seize the opportunity exigent circumstances provide and adopt a more collaborative organizational structure and culture which transcend physical location.

7 Success Factors for Collaboration Hackathons

The hackathon has gone mainstream.

Once a method used primarily by coders, the hackathon has moved beyond the boundaries of software development. From government agencies and universities to start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, organizations are embracing collaboration hackathons or what we might call collabathons to spark innovation, develop products and services, and improve processes for everything from quality control to recognition and reward.

Collaboration hackathons inspire team members to step away from their day-to-day roles and solve a big problem or brainstorm a new direction with a tangible take-away.  The structure of a successful collaboration hackathon mirrors that of a collaborative organization. We’re talking about an ad hoc team that forms for a specific purpose, collaborates, and then disbands. The 7 Success Factors for Collaboration Hackathons mirror the 7 steps in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration. These are:

1) Plan

2) People

3) Principles

4) Practices

5) Processes

6) Planet

7) Payoff

In the context of collaboration hackathons:

Plan is a problem to be solved, product/service to be developed, process to be created or improved or key question to be answered

People means broad participation in cross-functional collaboration hackathons regardless of level, role or region

Principles are the collaboration hackathon’s value system, the guidelines in solving the problem

Practices put principles into action through everything from a physical environment that fosters brainstorming to tools for capturing and refining ideas and putting them into action. Practices ensure that the hackathon is a collaborative group session (CGS) rather than a meeting.

Processes let hackers rapidly prototype and test ideas.

Planet puts communities in the center of the hackathons and inspires hackers to address how their ideas impact the communities in which the organization does business. The Planet step may consider everything from carbon footprint to privacy.

Payoff is the work product of the hackathon which must create value

These 7 steps prevent collaboration hackathons or collabathons from degenerating into meandering “bull sessions” at one extreme or turning into formal meetings at the opposite extreme. With The Bounty Effect’s 7 Steps, collaboration hackathons or collabathons succeed in solving big problems, answering key questions, developing products and services, improving processes, refining ideas and putting concepts into action.

Collabathons can help shift the structure of the entire organization from competitive, command-and-control to collaborative. The possibilities are endless.

Is Radical Transparency Collaborative?

I was chatting with Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates last Tuesday about the thin line between constructive and destructive confrontation in the workplace. “Confrontation has to be constructive,” the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund told me. "You need to get everything out on the table.” Constructive confrontation is one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I introduced in The Culture of Collaboration book. It’s also an aspect of Bridgewater’s controversial culture.

Ray had just finished an on-stage interview with Charles Duhigg on Bridgewater’s culture at the New York Times New Work Summit in Half Moon Bay, California. Collaboration was a central theme of the conference that brought together a few hundred chief executives, human resources leaders and others to share experiences, insights and challenges involving organizational culture.

“I want an idea meritocracy. I want independent thinkers who are going to disagree,” Ray told the audience. One way that Bridgewater accomplishes this objective is by capturing ninety-nine percent of meetings on video and making the archived video available to each of its roughly 1400 people at any time. The one percent of meetings not recorded involves personnel issues and proprietary trades.

“The most important thing I want is meaningful work and meaningful relationships, and we get there through radical truth.” Ray’s point is that radical truth and transparency build trust and curb hidden agendas and spin. “There’s no talking behind people’s backs,” according to Ray. “Bad things happen in the dark.” Bridgewater’s meritocracy, he explains, produces evidence which decreases bias and increases fact-based decisions.

Information democracy in which organizations widely share data and information is a key principle of collaborative companies. Trust and constructive confrontation are critical to collaboration. Hidden agendas and spin short circuit collaboration. So it would seem that Bridgewater’s brand of radical transparency would enhance collaboration. Right? Well, that depends.

There’s conflicting information regarding whether all confrontation is thoughtful and constructive at Bridgewater. That’s why I engaged Ray about the thin line between constructive and destructive confrontation and the need to keep disagreements thoughtful. Bridgewater makes performance reviews public and encourages team members to examine themselves before accepting areas for improvement, according to an April, 2014 article in the Harvard Business Review.

Performance reviews, whether public or private, can exhaust an organization and compromise value. Meetings, whether captured on video or not, waste time and energy.  A more effective alternative to meetings, which I outline in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration, is collaborative group sessions in which people co-create something of value.

Self-actualization seems to play a role in Bridgewater’s culture. Rather than check one’s emotions at the office door, team members are encouraged to recognize their emotional “triggers” and to “recognize the challenge between the logical and emotional self” in Ray’s words. Then people can more easily set aside emotional triggers and baggage.

I was curious how Bridgewater's culture resonated with the conference crowd, so I continued the discussion over lunch. Capturing almost all meetings on video for everybody to see is one cultural attribute that fell flat.   “That would never work in our organization,” one participant at my table insisted. She explained that her company values privacy and offers private drop-in spaces for on-the-fly interactions. Other attendees expressed similar views.  

The down side of capturing almost all meeting video is that people may put on game faces whenever they’re in a “live” meeting room and that formality takes hold.  In contrast, informality enhances collaboration which is why so many businesses have been hatched while doodling on napkins in bars and cafes. Floor proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate were once far less formal before these bodies allowed television cameras. Now there’s greater transparency but less collaboration across party lines.

Sometimes collaborators create greater value for the organization during small, private collaborative sessions either through technology or in the same room. Making video capture of these sessions widely available but optional may create the greatest value for collaborative organizations.

Clearly, radical transparency works for Bridgewater. Could the firm’s industry play a role? “You have to be an independent thinker in markets because consensus is built into price,” explains Ray.  Then again, challenging the status quo creates value in many industries.

For organizations adopting collaborative structures and cultures, there’s much to learn from Bridgewater. But what works for one company in a particular industry may fall short for another company in a different business. Trying to implement a carbon copy structure and culture would undoubtedly be a mistake.

Common Sense Trumps Data

I was in northwest Ohio this summer where Trump yard signs were everywhere and Clinton signs were practically nowhere.  

What changed? The increasing role of data.

Most Clinton staffers apparently believed that targeted election canvassing and social media produce greater results than yard signs, campaign buttons and bumper stickers. And the data suggests that physical signs have only a slight impact on campaigns.

The Hillary Clinton campaign favored online ads like this one over yard signs.

The lack of Ohio yard signs was a shock in that I covered presidential campaigns in Ohio during my early career as a reporter for WTOL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Toledo. Yard signs always dominated the landscape during election season. For voters looking around for clues of which way the wind is blowing among friends and neighbors, yard signs matter.

Yard signs illustrate how data and common sense can diverge. Common sense suggests that campaign signs, particularly those on residential lawns, have a significant impact. Many people vote for the candidate their friends and neighbors support. And regardless of ads and chatter on social media, there’s nothing quite like the real-world visual reinforcement of a candidate’s signs dominating one’s street or neighborhood.

And Ohio is by no means the only state that lacked Clinton yard signs.  Published reports indicate that Trump signs dominated rural Pennsylvania. Last January, Wired profiled Edward Kimmel, a part-time campaign photographer and Clinton supporter, who noticed the visual shift from previous presidential campaigns in Iowa. Kimmel voiced concerns about the impact a lack of signs might have on voter turnout. Kimmel was prescient.

A tyranny of data short circuited the Hillary Clinton campaign and contributed to Donald Trump’s victory. From the bubble of its Brooklyn Heights headquarters, the Hillary Clinton campaign apparently viewed yard signs as obsolete in the age of targeted digital canvassing and social media.

The Clinton campaign is just one example of how relying exclusively on data can compromise value. Wells Fargo emphasized measurement over common sense, and its reward system encouraged team members to cut corners and open unauthorized accounts for customers as I detailed in my September 13, 2016 post. The company is now paying the price in fines, lost business and compromised reputation.

A Donald Trump for President campaign yard sign in West Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Tony Webster. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Measurement mania and the tyranny of data are nothing new. In my most recent book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration , I write about the myopic approach dubbed “management by measurement” which dates back to the so-called Whiz Kids. In the 1940s, the Whiz Kids were junior faculty from Harvard Business School recruited by Charles “Tex” Thornton to run the Statistical Control unit of the Unites States Army. The group included Robert McNamara, who would later become president of Ford Motor Company, secretary of defense and president of the World Bank. 

The Whiz Kids applied statistical rigor in running the army, and later Henry Ford II hired the team to bring a similar data-driven focus to Ford. The Whiz Kids also introduced bureaucracy and hierarchy and developed rules requiring that, among other things, memos from vice presidents must appear on blue paper to highlight their importance.

The Whiz Kids sacrificed long-term value for short-term targets by limiting investment in new equipment and R&D. Plus Ford’s products suffered when plant leaders failed to prove through numbers the necessity for new equipment. Ultimately, this myopic focus on data led to foreign competition from companies that focused as much on engineering and production as on finance.

The Clinton campaign is by no means the only organization blinded by data. Organizations in every sector and industry suffer from measurement mania that impedes collaboration and value creation. In The Bounty Effect, I detail Five Measurement Counter-Measures to prevent data from short circuiting collaboration and compromising value. One of them is “perform a common sense reality check.”

Had the Clinton campaign used common sense to check its data, yard signs might have sprouted in the industrial Midwest and, more broadly, the campaign might have adopted a message that would have resonated with swing-state voters.

Regardless of level, role, region, organization or sector…never rely on data without a common sense reality check.

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.

Fixing Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf will testify before the Senate Banking Committee next Tuesday about the company’s sales practices. This word comes less than a week after Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million in fines from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Comptroller of the Currency and the City Attorney of Los Angeles. So what went wrong?

Well, I’ve seen similar disasters in other companies when the structure—and, yes, the culture—of  the organization encourages competing with colleagues and cutting corners rather than collaborating with colleagues, customers and partners. The key building blocks of the organizational structure are principles, practices and processes. We get clues about Wells Fargo’s principles from its written “vision and values” which include:

“Our ethics are the sum of all the decisions each of us makes every day. If you want to find out how strong a company’s ethics are, don’t listen to what its people say. Watch what they do.”

So what exactly did Wells Fargo people do to cost the company $185 million plus untold damage to its brand and reputation?

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wells Fargo opened over 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts and may have funded these accounts by transferring funds from existing customer accounts without consent or through “simulated” funding. This practice generated about two million dollars in fees from 85,000 accounts. The CFPB consent order also states that Wells Fargo submitted credit card applications, ordered debit cards and enrolled consumers in online banking without customer consent. Clearly, this behavior represents at best a disconnect between principles and processes particularly the reward system process.

© John Doe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Wells Fargo’s “vision and values” cover everything from ethics to doing what’s right for customers. But written “vision and values” and mission statements don’t tell the whole story for many companies. Often, the real principles that govern an organization are unwritten. These principles manifest in break rooms, cafeterias, meetings, “off-site” sessions and sometimes during dreaded performance reviews. At best, Wells Fargo’s unwritten principles echo its written values and the problem is a disconnect between principles and processes that culminated in widespread abuses.

At worst, the company’s unwritten principles are something like “win at all costs” and “loyalty above all” which by some accounts were the unwritten principles of Lehman Brothers.  Lehman, once the fourth largest investment bank in the United States, no longer exists. Neither does Enron which embraced the principle of following orders without questioning them. The wrong unwritten principles or a disconnect between the right principles and processes can start small with, say, approving mortgages for people who don’t qualify and culminate in a near collapse of the financial system.

Many organizations espouse collaborative principles while short circuiting collaboration and value creation through reward systems that reinforce internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior which can easily morph into cutting corners and illegally fudging numbers. Along the way, trust dies among team members and ultimately among customers, partners, regulators and others. This happens in industries ranging from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and technology. And it doesn’t help that increasingly team members across multiple industries prefer to interact with devices and computer systems rather than with their customers.

Why would the third largest U.S. bank by assets—and a favorite stock of Warren Buffett—risk its reputation by cutting corners? The most likely answer: to keep the squeeze on team members through a reward system that the bank believed would deliver ever better quarterly returns.

When I hear analysts and others suggest that a company has a secret sauce shrouded in mystery that delivers outlier returns, alarm bells reverberate in my brain. This is also true of financial advisors touting a particular investment. In 2009, Warren Buffett suggested in a Fortune interview that there was something special about how Wells Fargo does business. “The key to the future of Wells Fargo is continuing to get the money in at very low costs, selling all kinds of services to their customer and having spreads like nobody else has.” This sounds sort of like a secret sauce—and there go the alarm bells. Sometimes there’s a reason why a company is an outlier. Mostly, what Buffett was referring to is the Wells Fargo practice of cross selling which is simply selling more products to existing customers. It turns out that cross selling involved phantom sales. Wells has told some team members to stop cross-selling amid the crisis.

So how can Wells Fargo be fixed?  The company has fired more than 5000 employees, because of the illegal practices. But is the real problem these team members or the company’s principles, practices and processes?  Wells Fargo CFO John Shrewsberry apparently feels it’s the former. Shrewsberry reportedly told the Barclays Global Financial Conference in New York on Tuesday that the team members who committed the illegal acts were “at the lower end of the performance scale” and they were trying to hold onto their jobs.

Wells Fargo senior leaders are missing the point. The real villain is the reward system they created or approved that drives the behavior of team members at bank branches. This system apparently rewarded employees for opening accounts regardless of whether customers funded these accounts with new money. What value does this create? None. In fact, it likely costs more to open and ultimately close an unauthorized account than to do nothing. It makes little sense to blame bank branch employees for trying to retain their jobs when senior leaders have likely created principles, practices and processes that prevented more than 5000 people from acting ethically, selling products and creating value.

As its CEO prepares to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, Wells Fargo announced today the company is eliminating sales goals for retail bankers. Fixing the reward system without systemic repair may help for a while, but a lasting solution requires a more comprehensive approach. I’ve learned that trying to change an ingrained culture fails without changing the organizational structure.

The unfolding crisis provides an opportunity for Wells Fargo and many other companies in multiple industries with similar issues to replace an obsolete organizational structure while revamping the flawed reward system. This involves focusing like a laser beam on the key building blocks of a value-creating collaborative company: principles, practices and processes. Only then can the culture evolve.

Socrates and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s City Hall

The in-box culture is dead, but that may be news to the mayor and officials in New York City.

New York’s City Hall apparently never got the message about deserialization. What I mean by deserialization is curbing the in-box or pass-along approach to work and interaction that is critical for collaboration and value creation. But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has sure received plenty of memos…decision memos, that is.

 

New York City's City Hall reportedly embraces the pass-along approach to work and interaction

Before Mayor de Blasio makes many decisions, his staff prepares memos. And before these decision memos reach the Mayor, they reportedly require the signatures of at least eight officials including the first deputy mayor, the law department, the Mayor’s counsel, the budget director, the press secretary, the head of intergovernmental affairs and the deputy mayor with direct responsibility, according to a recent story by J. David Goodman in the New York Times. This is the antiquated pass-along approach.  

The Wall Street Journal reports that a memo on flight rules for helicopters took at least nine rounds of revisions. Nine rounds! This is pass-along times nine. And we wonder why citizens complain that government is mired in bureaucracy. The Times story quotes the Mayor’s chief of staff Tom Snyder as saying the Mayor’s decision-making process is “extremely granular, engaged, semi-Socratic.”

Actually, Mayor de Blasio’s approach is anything but Socratic. Socrates believed that the way to the truth was through questioning and dialogue. Socrates rejected writing, because writing meant—quite literally in ancient Athens—that ideas were set in stone or wax and that the process of developing those ideas was dead.  Socrates also rejected scripted speeches, because these are essentially the recitation of written words. For organizations making decisions, one form of the truth is accurate information—which is dynamic rather than set in stone. As the situation changes, sometimes hour-to-hour, what can be considered accurate information also shifts.

Using memos or email to make decisions compromises collaboration and disrupts value creation. This approach is a hallmark of command-and-control organizational structure and culture. By the time each department head or official has signed off on the course of action and passed the baton to the next official, the “truth” or facts have often changed. Socrates would roll over. Yet dialogue and questioning without a structure can also pose problems particularly for complex organizations such as New York City government and large, distributed enterprises. So what’s the alternative?

My most recent book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration, shows how to change the structure of organizations so that they can evolve from command and control to collaborative. And a fundamental element is creating an Open-Access Enterprise which enables the organization for spontaneous dialogue. In the Open-Access Enterprise, everybody has access to everybody else—and that access is immediate.

Using unified communications, we can see who is available and connect instantly. We can bring key stakeholders into collaborative group sessions (CGS) so we can hash out issues in real time, make decisions and create a work product without getting mired in the pass-along approach of memos and meetings. A CGS can occur virtually using unified communications and related tools or the session can happen physically with all participants in the same room.

Mayor De Blasio’s apparent goal of getting broad input into decisions makes sense. Embracing the Socratic method has merit. But the structure and processes of the Mayor’s office appear flawed and are short circuiting the goal. This is typical of many organizations that embrace collaboration as a concept but sabotage collaboration with a command-and-control structure that encourages bureaucracy and reinforces hidden agendas and internal competition. The solution is to adopt a collaborative organizational structure that leaves memos and traditional meetings in the dust. The in-box culture is dead.

Collaboration Washing

It takes more than appearing collaborative to achieve The Culture of Collaboration.

As collaboration has become a trend, companies and people talk collaboration without being collaborative. Just as greenwashing involves deceptively promoting the perception that an organization’s products and policies are environmentally-friendly, something similar is happening with collaboration. It's called collaboration washing: promoting collaboration as a corporate or product trait without any real collaboration happening.

When the first edition of my book The Culture of Collaboration® appeared in early 2007, consciousness for organizational collaboration was just beginning. One prominent Silicon Valley company had pre-ordered thousands of copies of the book. A new chief marketing officer disliked the word collaboration, and so the books remained in the company’s warehouse until the following year when more people, organizations and media outlets began embracing collaboration. Then the technology company distributed the books to customers globally.

Now collaboration is a buzz word. Marketers link myriad products to collaboration, and human resources people embrace the word as a corporate culture label. And guess what? The meaning of collaboration is getting diluted. In The Culture of Collaboration® book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.”

Many people regard social media use as a mark of a collaborative company. As I’ve demonstrated to many audiences, it’s quite possible to use social media and create zero value. It’s also possible to use any collaboration technology without creating value and, therefore, without collaborating. Some consider a youthful workforce as an indicator of a collaborative culture. But I’ve observed, interviewed and worked with numerous engineers in their fifties and sixties who have designed everything from game-changing software to airplanes. Without significant collaboration, these products would have been dead on arrival. And it’s easy to find internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior among people in their twenties working in technology and other leading-edge sectors.

Real collaboration requires adopting a collaborative organizational structure as I outline in my most recent book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. This goes well beyond buzz words and window dressing. The Bounty Effect is the second book in The Culture of Collaboration® series. The first book, The Culture of Collaboration®, is about raising the consciousness for a new way of working. The Bounty Effect focuses on how to achieve collaboration in organizations

Open-plan workspaces are a current popular marker of a collaborative company. Collaborative workplace design is much more than window dressing. It’s a key practice in adopting a collaborative structure, but it’s only one element. Citigroup is the latest Fortune 500 company to jump on the open-plan workspace bandwagon. Citi reportedly is adopting a “non-territorial” or “free-address” deskless approach similar to the one GlaxoSmithKline uses in its Philadelphia Navy Yard building. In The Bounty Effect, I explain GlaxoSmithKline's approach to collaborative workspaces and culture.

Citi CEO Michael Corbat told the Wall Street Journal that he is particularly excited about a “town square” space on the ground floor that will increase serendipitous encounters among team members. This, in turn, he expects will enhance communication and exchange of ideas. Also, Citigroup anticipates that the open-plan workspace will flatten hierarchies.

Essentially, Citigroup is taking a step towards adopting a more collaborative culture and structure. However, transforming a company into a global collaborative enterprise requires many more structural changes than the physical workplace environment. Many organizations such as police and fire departments, newsrooms and trading floors have operated with open-plan workspaces for years. Yet a lack of collaboration still compromises many of these organizations.

Citigroup and the increasing numbers of organizations adopting open workspaces can create incredible value through collaboration if they go beyond the most obvious manifestation of a shifting culture—the physical workplace environment—to embrace principles, practices and processes of collaborative organizational structure. These include everything from replacing the traditional organization chart and the traditional meeting to changing the recognition and reward system and keeping measurement mania in check.

Anything short of structural change is collaboration washing.

Lagoons and Collaborative Development

As the Falcon 2000LX reaches 41,000 feet, Uri Man begins answering questions from real estate developers. “It’s not stagnant. It’s circulating,” Man, the CEO of Crystal Lagoons USA, tells one inquiring passenger.

Soon we would see for ourselves. Man had chartered the plush jet and scooped up some developers and this author attending the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last Monday. Now we’re bound for Cabo San Lucas to tour a human-made lagoon.

“We are a technology company collaborating with developers,” Man explains. This unique collaboration for large-scale real estate development projects had piqued my interest. Crystal Lagoons has 300 lagoon projects underway globally.  Man did a stint as a developer before Crystal Lagoons founder Fernando Fischmann recruited him to accelerate lagoon projects in the U.S. “Right now we’re going to Cabo, because I can’t show you one yet in the U.S.” That’s about to change. The first Crystal Lagoon in the U.S. will reportedly open next summer at Epperson Ranch in Pasco County, Florida.

Meantime, we’re headed to the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja peninsula to see what a 10-acre salt water lagoon looks and feels like. As Man begins a slide presentation on his notebook computer, I begin

A 10-acre Crystal Lagoon at Diamante Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. (Photo credit: K.R. Hirzel)

visualizing the collaborative potential of lagoons. Resort developers need a new amenity to differentiate their projects. Coastal resorts can increase their waterfront, and inland resorts can gain a coastal experience. A Crystal Lagoons architect and project team collaborates with the developer’s planning team until they conceive a project with a lagoon as the centerpiece. The Crystal Lagoons technology uses disinfection “pulses” that reportedly allow using up to 100 times fewer chemicals than a swimming pool and an ultrasonic filtration system that allows using up to 50 times less energy than conventional filtration systems.

The Crystal Lagoons business model has nothing to do with construction and everything to do with licensing. The company has a major stake in the success of development projects, because it receives roughly two percent of every condominium and house sale and a similar cut of each time share dollar. For developers, constructing lagoons costs an average of $100,000 to $200,000 per acre.

The Falcon 2000X lands, and a greeting party boards the plane and passes out hand-blown shot glasses. After a ride through some dusty Cabo streets, we arrive at the Diamante development west of the city on the Pacific Ocean. After we tour the resort, I change into my swim suit and plunge into the salt water lagoon. As I swim laps in a life-guarded area near one of two beaches, kayaks explore the expanse of this man-made mini ocean.

En route back to San Francisco, Uri Man talks about the future of Crystal Lagoons with the gusto of a bond trader (he used to be one) and the chutzpah of a guy who once hit on Fox News anchor Ainsley Earhardt on live TV (which he did). That future may involve cross-sector collaboration among industry and governments.

Crystal Lagoons USA CEO Uri Man on board a Falcon 2000LX en route to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. (Photo credit: K.R. Hirzel)

“Parks are big money losers for states, cities and countries,” Man insists. So why not collaborate with governments to transform parks with lagoons? “Then it’s not just ten people showing up with their dogs,” says Man. “You could have hundreds of thousands showing up.”

The licensing revenue business model, which the company would likely modify for government work, ties the success of Crystal Lagoons to the achievements of developers and their large-scale projects. Both parties share wins and losses. So Crystal Lagoons enters into collaborations carefully and works with developers to create mutual value. More broadly, business partners can achieve smashing success if incentives and business models foster symbiotic relationships and collaborative value creation.

Millennial Malarkey

“The people under 30 get it. It’s second nature to them.”

 “We have a bifurcated workforce.”

 “Let’s just turn the keys over to the Millennials. They get it. We don’t.”

These are some snippets of conversation from well-intentioned change agents who overemphasize generational differences while attempting to transform their organizations into collaborative enterprises. In The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®, I identify this scenario as the Generation Gap Trap. It’s a trap, because overemphasizing generational differences reinforces fear and internal competition which short circuit collaboration.

Undoubtedly, younger team members who are so-called “digital natives” are accustomed to using tools such as texting, instant messaging, and social media. It takes more than using tools, though, to collaborate. In The Culture of Collaboration® book, I define collaboration as working together to create value. And it’s quite possible to text, IM, or use social media without creating any value.

The point is that age is by no means a predictor of collaborative behavior.  Some people right out of college or graduate school internally compete while they use “collaborative” tools and technologies. Meantime, collaboration is baked into the behavior of some team members in their fifties and sixties. Some disciplines like aerospace engineering or animation are inherently collaborative, and therefore experience in these fields is a better predictor of collaborative behavior than age. I have worked with some “boring” industrial companies in which people work together to create value far more easily and often than team members in supposedly collaborative Silicon Valley companies.

After seemingly endless media reports describing how millennials demand a collaborative workplace, a new CEB study indicates that millennnials—those born between 1980 and 2000—are the most competitive generation in today’s workplace. Among CEB’s findings are that millennials are more driven by performance relative to others than by absolute performance and that millennials are less likely to trust peers and their peers’ input. Trust, incidentally, is one of the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration that my colleagues and I have identified. Without trust, collaboration is dead on arrival.

In an August 1, 2015 “Schumpeter” column in The Economist, the unidentified columnist explores some of these millennial myths and cites the CEB study. The columnist incorrectly concludes from the research that to motivate young team members, organizations should put less emphasis on collaboration. The real take-away regarding the CEB study is that emphasizing generational differences is folly.

De-emphasizing collaboration because millennials are less motivated by it would pander to a generation without guiding it. Instead, doubling down on adopting collaborative organizational structures and cultures will ultimately motivate team members regardless of generation and create far more value than command-and-control and internal competition.