The Culture of Collaboration: Maximizing Time, Talent and Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy - Hardcover

Evan Rosen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 097746170X ISBN 13: 9780977461707

Publisher: Red Ape Publishing, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Evan Rosen

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Discover how Boeing maximizes time, tools and global talent in designing the 787 Dreamliner. Learn how Toyota profits from collaborative principles and culture as engineers, assembly workers, and business partners concurrently design new vehicles and production processes. Find out how a start-up foundation can slash drug discovery time by changing the culture of medical research. See how the Mayo Clinic breaks down barriers among people and departments to innovate everything from patient check-in to physical examinations.

In this eye-opening and groundbreaking book, communication and collaboratin strategist Evan Rosen explores how collaborative culture is changing business models and the nature of work. Rosen provides a timely and revealing look inside the world's most collaborative organizations including Toyota, Boeing, Procter & Gamble, DreamWorks Animation, The Dow Chemical Company, Industrial Light & Magic, the Mayo Clinic and others. He explains how their methods can create value in almost every industry. Rosen also describes the trend towards real-time, spontaneous collaboration and the "deserialization" of interaction and work.

Rosen reveals how organizations of all sizes and types can adopt collaborative culture to create unprecedented value. In an inspiring narrative, he describes the shift from scheduled to spontaneous collaboration and explains the role of "presence-enabled" tools in linking collaborators globally. The Culture of Collaboration also covers:

• The Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration
• How to fit collaboration into work styles and lifestyles
• Exploiting mirror zones in maximizing time, talent and tools
• Key trends impacting collaboration including compliance
• How leaders can instill a Culture of Collaboration
• New strategies for workplace and virtual environment design
• Sharing vs. hoarding information
• Deserialization of work
• New approaches for integrating collaborative tools and strategies into organizational cultures
• The Global Collaborative Enterprise
• Global work sharing and "high-level" collaboration

Reviews

The in-box culture is dead," insists Rosen, so information workers need to learn how to come together on projects spontaneously in real time, instead of handling assignments alone and passing them down the line. He sees electronic tools like instant messaging and video conferencing as indispensable for collaboration, particularly for people who work thousands of miles apart. But, he cautions, such tools will only be effective for companies that actively promote informal, nonhierarchical relationships to spark innovation among their employees (similar to the way smokers from different departments can bond out on the sidewalk). To support his argument, he makes much use of anecdotal evidence from companies like Toyota, Boeing, Procter & Gamble, Dreamworks and the Mayo Clinic. Unfortunately, once readers clear a path through buzzwords like "optimum collaboration environments" and "global collaborative enterprise," Rosen's insights are pretty obvious and his advice can seem simplistic. "Communication is a key element in collaboration" goes one such observation, "therefore an organization must communicate well to collaborate effectively." Little here will surprise experienced managers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Ape Publishing
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 097746170X
• ISBN 13: 9780977461707
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320