At least from my experiences, I believe that most businesses don’t understand collaboration. How many of your colleagues or customers are still emailing Word and Excel documents as attachments? If you are over 30 years old, chances are your business processes are still heavily influenced from the Microsoft dominated days of installed software more than two decades ago. The world is a different place now. There are plenty of examples of dynamic, young companies are prospering even when the partners are global dispersed, but they are still the exception.
Stephan Dohrn on 17 May 11Summary: "Although groups are initially "wise," knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The "social influence effect" diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The "range reduction effect" moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The "confidence effect" boosts individuals' confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis."