managers in different functions or different business units seem surprisingly reluctant to work together
Jealousies, misunderstandings and enmity seem more common than collaboration
Why does collaboration fail? There are lots of reasons. Collaboration can be time-consuming. It creates risks for the participants. Competing objectives can be hard to resolve
"Competing objectives can be hard to resolve", well, this is what happens when you try to create a culture of collaboration within an overarching competitive environment.
Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome.
actions are interdependent
committed to a single result
joint decisions
cautious about taking unilateral action
someone with the authority to resolve disputes
Team members may dislike
each other
But with a good leader they can still perform.
Collaborators face a different challenge
they often also have competing goals
the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities
collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences
collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.
a collaborative relationship
is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.
my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team.
“teaming”: bringing together a team of professionals for a specific task
The old cubicle-based, static company is increasingly being replaced by a more fluid and mobile model: “the constant assembly, disassembly, and reassembly of people, talent, and ideas around a range of challenges and opportunities.”
Therefore, the new economy and its “seminomadic workforce” will require “new places to gather, work, live, and interact.”
The consumer electronics company Plantronics, for example, knowing that on any given day 40% of its workforce will be working elsewhere, designed its corporate campus to only 60% capacity
Their joint enterprise, NextSpace, became their first venture into what they call “coworking,” or the creation of “shared collaborative workspaces.”
also nurtures what the authors call “managed serendipity” — ad hoc collaboration between people with diverging but complementary skills
the number of coworking spaces worldwide has shot up from 30 in 2006 to 1,130 in 2011
someone needs to keep an eye on the big picture, to “connect the dots.”
workspaces are designed on a flexible, on-demand and as-needed basis
Coonerty and Neuner found that the most productive collaborations tended to pair highly specialized experts with big-picture thinkers
they were struck by the number of entrepreneurs and freelancers working at coffee shops in the area
Business Talent Group
Clients get the specialized help they need at a cost below that of a full-time employee or traditional consulting firm, and specialists are well compensated and rewarded with flexible schedules and a greater degree of choice about which projects to take.
This has produced a new market dynamic in which the headhunter of yesteryear has been replaced by “talent brokers” who connect highly specialized talent with companies on a project-by-project basis
Matthew Mullenweg, doesn’t have much faith in traditional office buildings or corporate campuses: “I would argue that most offices are full of people not working.”
On the other hand, Mullenweg is a big believer in face-to-face collaboration and brainstorming, and flies his teams all over the globe to do so.
He also set up an informal workspace in San Francisco called the Lounge
Additionally, a 2010 Kauffman-Rand study worried that employer-based health insurance, by discouraging risk-taking, will be an ongoing drag on entrepreneurship
the problem of payroll taxes for freelancers
up to 44% of independent workers encounter difficulty getting paid fully for their work