(Online) Collaboration - The Next Generation Company

John Chambers - President and CEO of Cisco Systems - recently gave a wonderful speech at MIT about how Cisco is able to get to market so quickly, innovate at an incredible rate, and enjoy and maintain their growth and profitability figures.

I urge any manager, project manager, team leader, facilitator, etc. to sit and listen through it.

I found it here:
http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/building-a-next-generation-company/

If you think a one hour video is too long, start to whet your appetite here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/revolution-in-san-jose.html

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After listening and reading, be aware of an article in the April 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review that cautions excessive use of collaboration. 'When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company' by Morten T. Hansen:

Collaboration comes with several types of cost:

1. The cost to have the infrastructure to perform collaboration - online or traditional. You may want a company internal version of facebook of some sort. The geeks at Cisco were obviously able to easily put something like that together themselves.

2. The time of employees spent on blogging and collaborating online or in meetings is a cost to the company.

3. There is an opportunity cost as the time spent on collaboration could be spent on doing the things they are originally expected to do.

All this needs to be outweighed by the benefit/return from collaborating. The author calls it the 'Collaboration Premium'.

"IT'S A MISTAKE to underestimate collaboration costs in the hope that collaboration can be mandated or will naturally improve during the course of a project."