Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work - John Hagel III, John Seely Brown - Harvard Business Review

It's been a while since we posted here because of all the craziness surrounding the launch of our book, The Power of Pull, but we are happy to announce that we're going to be resuming a regular schedule of postings to build on the themes in our book. We thought we would kick off our new postings by summarizing some of the ideas from Pull that resonated the most in our many conversations from the last few months. from The Power of Pull. The Red Queen was optimistic. Nearly everybody in management is familiar with the Red Queen effect, taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: this is the notion that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

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Peter Senge on collaboration, sustainability and improvisations - MIT Management Review

What would it take to get rid of disposable cups? That was a question MIT Sloan senior lecturer Peter Senge raised in an interesting keynote address this morning at the MIT Sustainability Summit 2010. Senge, who is the author of well-known books such as The Fifth Discipline and The Necessary Revolution, focused on the need for collaboration among unlikely partners to achieve real progress on sustainability issues – and convert our “take-make-waste” economy into a new, more sustainable economy. Senge used the example of disposable coffee cups (a topic apparently on his mind because he came to the Sustainability Summit from a Starbucks-convened cup summit taking place down the street) to get the MIT Sustainability Summit attendees thinking about the need for collaboration in sustainability projects.

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Collaboration: Building and Managing Trust - Allcollaboration.com

The issue of trust is at the core of effective collaboration. The most basic definition of collaboration (co-labor) is working jointly with others for shared goals and outcomes. The need for trust thus arises due to the interdependence between parties. A trust relationship inherently has risk for the parties involved. Individual personal behaviors are different that manage this trust and associated risk. Since trust it at the core of collaboration, how does one build trust? What is trust anyway? What are individual behaviors and expectations in a trust relationship? What can be done to rebuild trust when trust is violated? These are some of the question we address in this post. We can recall what President Reagan often said: Trust but verify. That is, I am willing to trust you only to the extent I can verify what you say. Trust is based on evidence, not words. Evidence is the key to minimizing risk in this instance. This is not a trust relationship in fact; it is a relationship of distrust. But, the circumstances of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) created the interdependence for shared goals and outcomes.

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My Eureka Moment With Strategy - Roger Martin - Harvard Business Review

Do you find that company strategy meetings often descend into adversarial position-taking? Many people complain to me that it's the single biggest block to strategy-making that they encounter. But getting around that block is a lot easier than you might think. The solution lies simply in posing a single question, which I believe is the most important question in strategy. I discovered the question about 15 years ago in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a town of 7,500 inhabitants equidistant from Green Bay, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota. We had a group of about 10 executives from a mining company in a conference room, split evenly between mine management and executives from head office in Toronto. Everybody had an opinion — i.e. what was true — but given the wide array of experiences, technical knowledge, and organizational interests, those opinions were all over the map. We quickly descended into adversarial position-taking and I could tell it was going nowhere.

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Creating Collaboration Takes More Than Technology - BRW - Evan Rosen

Wikis, Web conferencing, and the like won't help people work together if the corporate culture is internally competitive and hierarchical, Why should any organization adopt collaboration? There's only one reason—value creation. After all, if we're not creating value, what's the point? With a growing consciousness for collaboration, many companies are investing in collaboration tools and technologies. These range from enterprise instant messaging and unified communications, wikis, and enterprise social media to virtual worlds, Web conferencing, and telepresence. In a typical scenario, the months fly by after the collaboration tools are implemented. As the seasons change, decision-makers anticipate reaping the benefits of collaboration. And perhaps they can even point to successes within particular business units or functions. Often, though, it's the same old story.

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