U.S. business executives often talk about the need to embrace "collaboration," as a means to being more competitive and innovative, with collaboration viewed as an accelerator to both characteristics in the global marketplace.
But why? Well, we should probably follow the money.
In the past 25 to 30 years, the aggregate value of stock market has steadily and pronouncedly shifted to an asset base of "intangibles." Ultimately that means the value resides with the talent and skills of the knowledge worker and their capacity to engage in knowledge creation and value with colleagues, partners and customers. And that knowledge and value creation is the result of what is termed "tacit interactions."
In an Accenture report published in 2004, Future Value: The $7 Trillion Challenge, notes that those intangible assets have "supplanted tangible assets as the key value drivers in the economy."
Despite any impact of the 2008 downturn on specific numbers, this trend remains the nature of asset value and value creation in the 21st century.
While advancements in communications and Web 2.0 collaboration technology and tools are major enablers of collaboration practice, and there's lots of discussion about those technologies, what's often missing is the concomitant discussion about the actual, disciplined practice of collaboration.
One of the best articles on the practice of collaboration is a Harvard Business Review article entitled Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf. And while the article was published a few years ago, it recommendations often remain the exception rather than the rule in organizations today.
Here are Evans and Wolf's Collaboration Rules, highlighted in a mind map.
Technology underpins many aspects of this model, but just as importantly, the Evans and Wolf "rules" speak to culture, behavior and practice. I'll be talking about each one of these areas in upcoming posts.
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