The Power of Collaboration: Powerful Insights from Silicon Valley to Successfully Grow Groups, Strengthen Alliances, and Boost Team Potential - Softcover

Spitzer, Thea Singer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632651238 ISBN 13: 9781632651235

Verlag: CAREER PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

To succeed these days your organization must create amazing results.

Your employees and teams may be quite capable of handling their specific areas of focus, but unless you get them to work together, your products, services, and profits will suffer. While progress has been made, maximizing collaboration is still a challenge for many companies. They need a new approach.

Over the last quarter century, California's Silicon Valley has become synonymous with building complex, successful businesses. Companies and leaders there have succeeded because they did more than apply existing business models--they created a new model for collaboration.

Dr. Thea Singer Spitzer has combined her longstanding expertise on this subject with innovative thinking, research, and focused interviews with Silicon Valley leaders to create a practical framework for the next epoch of collaboration. The Power of Collaboration shows how any company, anywhere, can adapt to achieve its goals. This cutting-edge title features:

Narratives about collaboration from top leaders in Silicon Valley.

A sensible, straightforward collaboration framework.

Positive, realistic hints for adapting that framework to your organization.

With The Power of Collaboration as your guide, those amazing results will be surprisingly easy to achieve.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thea Singer Spitzer, founder of Critical Change LLC, has been a consultant, strategic advisor, and coach to top executives and leaders for nearly 30 years, including 16 years at Microsoft. She has received accolades and awards for her work with a broad array of industries including software, telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, health care, utilities, and retail. Singer Spitzer earned her PhD in organizational systems from Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center and her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan. She resides and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. To learn more about her, please visit www.Critical-Change.com.

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The Power of Collaboration

Powerful Insights from Silicon Valley to Successfully Grow Groups, Strengthen Alliances, and Boost Team Potential

By Thea Singer Spitzer

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2018 Thea Singer Spitzer, PhD
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63265-123-5

Contents

Introduction: Harmonizing Employee Efforts, 
Chapter 1: The Power of Collaboration, 
Chapter 2: Characteristics of Silicon Valley Collaborators, 
Chapter 3: Stories of Successful Collaborations, 
Chapter 4: The Silicon Valley Approach to Collaboration, 
Chapter 5: Individual Skills that Enhance Collaboration, 
Chapter 6: The First Two Individual Skills: Being True to Yourself and True to Others, 
Chapter 7: The Other Individual Skills: Being True to the Work and True to the Company, 
Chapter 8: Agile Work Process: Anyplace, Anytime, 
Chapter 9: Other Vital Team Tools that Boost Collaboration, 
Chapter 10: Architecting Your Management Practices, 
Chapter 11: Employee Incentives, 
Chapter 12: Access Enables Collaboration, 
Chapter 13: Collaborative Ethos: The Secret Sauce in the SVAC, 
Chapter 14: The End Is the Beginning, 
Final Words, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

THE POWER OF COLLABORATION

Many of the amazing things that have defined us were created by people in collaboration with others. The United States Constitution was crafted by 39 men working together. Marie and Pierre Curie won a Nobel Prize for their discoveries regarding radiation. James Watson and Francis Crick worked with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin to decode the secrets of DNA. On another note, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr came together and changed popular music forever.

Collaboration in business is just as important. For instance, it made an enormous difference in the launching and running of LinkedIn. Reid Hoffman could have started the company on his own, but knew it would be more likely to be a game-changer if he teamed up with several colleagues. He did, and today, LinkedIn boasts more than 500 million members globally. Collaboration is still a defining feature of how their employees perform their work.

Imagine our world without these and many other discoveries that came about because people were able to blend their individual expertise into collective intelligence to accomplish amazing things.

It is in our nature as human beings to collaborate. Evidence from the earliest agricultural era, 10,000 years ago, confirms that people lived in communities and combined their efforts. Even back then, people were better off pooling their talent and resources with others, rather than going it alone.

Although people have known about and used collaboration for a long time, our search for ways to make it more effective in work-places is fairly recent. Since the latter half of the 20th century, corporate leaders have been trying to bring employees together more effectively. This doesn't mean doing everything as a team or discussing things ad nauseam until complete consensus is reached. It simply means coming together when it adds value and produces better outcomes than we can achieve on our own.

THE BUSINESS IMPERATIVE

The question is not "Is your company doing well?" Rather, it is "Could you be doing even better?" There are very few companies that can honestly answer that question in the negative. However successful a company is, most could be even more successful.

The demand for innovations that delight customers is constant. What does that have to do with collaboration? As marketing expert John Ward put it, "Innovation and collaboration go together like ... well, like Batman and Robin. Just like that dynamic duo ... innovation and collaboration are more powerful together."

Imagine a group of renowned chefs coming together to create an extraordinary multi-course banquet for a special event. What if each of them is asked to prepare their signature recipe for the course assigned to them. The trouble is that there is no time for those chefs to talk with each other and design a menu in which all the dishes complement each other. When the appetizer, soup, salad, entrée, vegetable, and dessert are served, there is little chance that this meal is going to be a palate-pleasing experience.

This example might seem too far-fetched to actually happen in a workplace. Yet it's all too accurate a description of things that have occurred over the decades, and still do happen. Picture how different that dinner could have been if those chefs had the chance to chat and decide on courses that not only tasted wonderful on their own, but also fit well together. As some of them realized that their recipe didn't fit the theme they would have prepared something else for the good of the dinner.

Study after study reports that staff believe their company would benefit if employees worked together better. In a 2005 McKinsey Quarterly study, 80 percent of senior executives said they knew that successful collaboration across product, functional, and geographic lines was crucial. Yet, only 25 percent of them rated their own company effective in this regard.

Much has been learned about fostering collaboration since that study. Yet we still have plenty of room for improvement. In a 2015 survey, senior leaders at a variety of companies still cited poor collaboration between employees as one of the biggest threats to their company's success.

The good news is that most people now recognize the need for collaboration. Businesses see that the failure to collaborate hurts them, and they've acted on it. Most leaders are trying to bring employees together when it makes sense. They are doing much better at this than they did in the past. For instance, engineers, sales and marketing professionals, and finance and other experts increasingly come together to design, manufacture, and sell products that thrill customers.

The challenge is that just bringing staff together doesn't guarantee that they will automatically be able to leverage their collective intelligence. There is opportunity to help those people be even more effective when they come together. When it works well, something astonishing happens. Individuals actually start to "interact as components of a larger mind ... you [create] a communal brain." That creation of communal brain is at the heart of truly effective collaboration.

DEFINING COLLABORATION

How do you define collaboration? Give some thought to this question before you read on.

Now let's look at how some Silicon Valley leaders defined it when they spoke with me:

[??] "It's how we work together when we're not directed to; when we are contributing as a group of people."

[??] "Leaders and employees all engaged together, sharing information, ideas, goals, pretty much everything. ... Transparency is really important — allowing people to see the bigger picture and the details. When there's a problem or challenge, working together to solve it, instead of playing the blame game."

[??] "Cooperating; not only within our functional group. Working up, down, within, and outside. ... Being holistic in our view and in how we communicate it. Figuring out how to knock down walls that are getting in the way. How to foster great ideas rather than kill them."

[??] "Asking myself: 'How can I help you?' versus 'What am I going to get out of this for myself?'. ... 'How can I help build trust quicker?' "

[??] "Sharing in a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: CAREER PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1632651238
• ISBN 13: 9781632651235
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei