The Collaboration Imperative provides a great

“The Collaboration Imperative provides a great deal of insight
into how to create competitiveness and innovation through celebrating
a diversity of talents.”
— Esko Aho, Executive Vice President, Nokia Corporation and
Former Prime Minister of Finland
“Collaboration is easy to get wrong, undermining performance.
Ricci and Wiese—two of the world’s foremost experts on
collaboration—show you how to get it right and deliver great results.
This book is an invaluable toolkit based on what works.”
— Morten T. Hansen, Professor, UC Berkeley and INSEAD and
author of Collaboration
Do you want to lead the kind of company that can quickly seize any opportunity and solve any
problem? The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s
True Potential offers valuable executive strategies
to unleash the hidden assets trapped inside your company—from talent and
experience to the right answer and the next big idea. Free these assets through
increased collaboration and you build a world-class organization that can tackle market
opportunities with lightning speed.
Co-written by two Cisco executives, The Collaboration Imperative draws on their own experiences and from forward-thinking companies around the world. The book outlines actionable
strategies to:

collaboration before your competitors will yield profound rewards for you and your team.

THE COLLABORATION IMPERATIVE

“I wish I’d had this book when I was starting out. At every level of
management and leadership, this book is an undeniable resource.”
— Peter Guber, CEO, Mandalay Entertainment Group and author
of #1 New York Times best-seller Tell to Win

RICCI
WIESE

THE

COLLABORATION
IMPERATIVE
Executive Strategies for Unlocking
Your Organization’s True Potential

RON RICCI CARL WIESE
FOREWORD BY PETER GUBER, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF TELL TO WIN

COLLABORATION
MATTERS

Why you’ll embrace collaborative
business practices or live to regret it.

DISCOVER THE REWARDS

CULTURE
TECHNOLOGY
PROCESS
OF COLLABOR ATIVE PR ACTICES

E XECUTIVE SUMMARY

Improved collaboration represents your
best opportunity to tap the full range of
talents of your people, move with greater
speed and ﬂexibility, and compete to win
over the next decade.
Building a collaborative organization requires
a transformative approach to culture,
processes and technology—along with an
unwavering commitment from top to bottom. If you foster a culture that encourages
collaborative behaviors, put processes in
place to help people work better together
and adopt technologies that facilitate
collaboration, your efforts will be rewarded
with an energized organization that
can adapt quickly to changing markets
and deliver results.
Copyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
All Rights Reserved. www.thecollaborationimperative.com

Across every organization lies hidden
treasure just waiting to be discovered.
It’s not hiding in a budget spreadsheet or a
warehouse full of inventory. It lies within your
people—in their ideas, their experiences,
their focus, their energy. The more you
empower them to share their knowledge and
skills, the more successful your organization
will be. From ideas come innovation and
new forms of productivity.
Companies are learning this lesson every day as they
create new ways for employees to contribute creative solutions to business challenges, especially with the Internet
redeﬁning work boundaries. Health care professionals can
better treat patients, engineers can work together more
seamlessly on innovations, companies can reduce cycle
times, customer-service agents can ﬁnd and share expertise
faster and supply-chain constituents can communicate
more effectively to take advantage of new opportunities to
source goods and materials. The list goes on and on, and
it boils down to being more adaptable and agile in the new
networked business reality.
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Collaboration Matters

Companies everywhere are responding to three trends
that are shaping a new business landscape, making speed and
ﬂexibility the most important differentiators in just about
every industry across the globe:
1. Competition comes from anywhere and everywhere.
The barriers to entry are lower than ever, and you cannot predict who will enter your market next. It might be
a startup in India, China, Africa or Eastern Europe—or
competition from another industry. How do you stay
ahead when you don’t know which organizations you’ll
compete with next month or next year?
2. Companies often have to focus on core competencies
and partner to do everything else. Where it was once an
advantage to own every aspect of a value chain with the
goal of vertically integrating an industry, today it makes
more sense to focus on the aspect of the value chain that
is most critical to your success and partner for the rest.
The “core vs. context” approach is just as relevant today
as when it was introduced. Narrow your focus to just
what you do best, and then drive operational excellence
from start to ﬁnish.
3. Open systems change the game. The Internet is the
most disruptive force in the history of business. It’s hard
to remember a time before email and instant access to
all kinds of information. The Internet and networking
technologies connect us in ways once thought impossible, opening the door for innovative business models.
Think about e-commerce, online ﬁnancial services,
and supply chain and sales force automation. But now,
businesses must adapt to another wave of networked
technology that is shaping the modern working experience into one that is mobile, social, virtual and driven by
video communications.
Copyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
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The Collaboration Imperative

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What do these trends mean for business leaders?
Together, they create an urgent need for increased adaptability. In this environment, the most important step you
can take to maximize future success is to build ﬂexibility
into your business practices and increase the speed with
which you can adjust your strategy to capitalize on fastmoving market transitions.

EXPE RT TI P ON ADAPTI NG

“If your organization cannot adapt, evolve and
respond to the expectations and desires of
the people you’re serving—including your
employees—you will fall in their estimation and
ﬁnd your company mired in mediocrity.”
—Professor Tony O’Driscoll, Duke University Fuqua School of Business

The technology that runs our companies and our lives
is fast, open, decentralized and highly adaptable. What if
organizations followed the same model? How would that
change the way we work, and what beneﬁts could emerge
from the transformation? This book explores the answers to
these questions.
Just as the initial emergence of the Internet changed
everything, we’re now in the early stages of another fundamental shift. It’s the decade of collaboration—a time when
people who’ve never met ﬁnd each other and work together,
and employees at any level or any remote corner of an organization can provide the spark for your next important innovation. Collaboration is your best opportunity for building an
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Copyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
All Rights Reserved. www.thecollaborationimperative.com
Collaboration Matters

enterprise that can adapt to fast-changing market pressures.
It helps you achieve operational excellence today and deliver
innovation tomorrow.
Imagine an organization in which people:
> Communicate openly across business functions and
departments
> Are always aware of the company’s objectives and
priorities, even as they rapidly evolve
> Perform multiple different roles during the day
> Self-select for projects based on interest, expertise and
importance to the business
> Locate needed information in real time
> Work as mobile and distributed participants—even
beyond the walls of the company—as partners, customers, contractors and suppliers

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When you allow people to collaborate well, the organization captures value you simply cannot discover through a
more rigid approach. If Six Sigma, the management philosophy originated by Motorola and popularized by General
Electric, Honeywell and others, is about driving variation out
of your processes, one of the beneﬁts of collaboration is its
ability to bring more variation in.1 This means tapping into a
larger, more diverse pool of people. Some of these people will
report to you, others will not. Some will come from partners, suppliers or other organizations within your business
ecosystem, including your customers or competitors.
The beneﬁts of this increased diversity run deep. For
example, you can:
> Empower people to contribute important ideas and
experiences
> Shorten product development or sales cycle times
> Increase employee productivity
Copyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
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The Collaboration Imperative

Collaboration is
about maximizing the
value inherent
in the diversity of
your people.

>
>
>
>
>

Align teams around your organization’s larger
shared goals
Move quickly from strategy to execution
Identify and eradicate organizational overlaps
Ensure knowledge and resources sharing
Spark product and business model innovation
Save money across the organization

But We’re Already Collaborating, Aren’t We?

Every time you send a group email, convene a crossfunctional meeting, host a Web conference, post a comment
on a discussion forum or contribute to a company wiki, you’re
collaborating. But this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Solving the CEO’s Conundrum
With few exceptions, every successful organization faces the same
challenge: How do we operate at peak performance today while also setting
ourselves up for success tomorrow?
We call this the CEO’s Conundrum. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a
Fortune 500 company or a garage-based startup of savvy entrepreneurs,
the challenge remains the same.
Collaboration allows you to bring together the right people at the right
time to make the most informed decisions. It enables you to address
fast-moving opportunities and helps you balance operational excellence and
innovation in a way that solves the CEO’s Conundrum.

Collaboration is much more than communications. It is the
way that people in an organization function together. Better
collaboration means better business operations and, ultimately, better results—faster.
Most companies today collaborate vertically (with
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Collaboration Matters

suppliers and distributors, for example), but future collaboration will increasingly extend to broader “ﬂash” communities—small groups of specialized players that might include
cross-functional teams, customers, partners, universities,
even competitors. As people learn to collaborate better, you’ll
see nimble teams of subject-matter experts form quickly to
get work done and then disband just as fast, only to reconﬁgure again to focus on the next problem or opportunity.
These smaller, nimbler teams drive results by drawing
experts to projects rather than assigning them top-down.
With effective collaboration, your people are empowered by
new organizational cultures that celebrate a diversity
of talents and promote not only the sharing of knowledge
and resources, but also of accountability and rewards.
Let’s be clear—collaboration is not about achieving consensus. In fact, consensus is the enemy of collaboration. For
collaboration to unlock your people’s best work, you’ll
need to create the conditions for collaboration to ﬂourish.
Channel the diversity of your people by creating processes
that allow your company to reap the beneﬁts of more perConsensus is
spectives while making it clear who has decision-making
the enemy
rights. Set the expectation that once decisions are made,
of collaboration.
collaborative efforts move from exploring and debating
possibilities to executing outcomes. Pervasive collaboration
technologies connect these teams. The technology toolbox is
constantly evolving to help teams align and mobilize across
geographies, time zones and organizational boundaries.
You are collaborating, but there is more to explore. All
around us, companies are embracing collaborative behavior. It’s up to business leaders like you to chart a course for
collaboration that works for your organization. Here’s the
challenge: It’s harder than you might expect to get the job
done right.
Copyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
All Rights Reserved. www.thecollaborationimperative.com
The Collaboration Imperative

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Q&A

The Future of Work
Has Arrived

Here, Dr. Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of
Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Founding
Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, as well as the author
of the seminal book The Future of Work, discusses how the intersection
of technology innovation and work practices is driving collaboration.
Q: How is increased decentralization and networked collaboration
changing the nature of work?
A: We’re now in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in
business that—in the long run—may be as important for business as
the change to democracies was for governments. It’s now possible for
the ﬁrst time in human history to have the economic beneﬁts of large
organizations and the human beneﬁts of very small organizations—ﬂexibility, creativity, motivation and freedom.
This is possible now because a new generation of information
technologies is reducing the cost of communication and information
sharing to very low levels. This makes it possible for huge numbers
of people, even in large organizations, to have enough information to
make sensible decisions on their own instead of waiting for orders
from someone above them who supposedly knows more than they do.
Q: What are the beneﬁts of the proliferation of low-cost
communication and information sharing?
A: A bunch of nice things happen when people make decisions for
themselves instead of just following orders. They often are much more
highly motivated. They’re willing to work harder. They’re more creative.
Decision empowerment lets people be more ﬂexible and adaptable,
which can allow them to serve customers better. Even though it won’t
happen everywhere, this shift toward increased decentralized
decision making, toward more human freedom in business, is likely to

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Collaboration Matters

happen in more areas of our economy over the coming decades.

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Q: Is decentralization always a good thing?
A: I certainly don’t believe that everything should be decentralized all the
time. There’s obviously a trade off. Part of what managers need to do
in this new world is to sharpen their ability to know when a centralized
or a decentralized approach is best. Loosely speaking, you should
decentralize things only when the beneﬁts of doing so are greater
than the costs or the risks.
If your organization is imaginative, you can often design new
decentralized ways of doing things that let you reap the advantages of
decentralization while avoiding many of the usual risks. In other words,
you can ﬁnd ways to establish hard and fast parameters that provide
the necessary structure to minimize the risks associated with more
collaborative business practices but still give you the ability to benet
from a more participative, inclusive, dynamic approach.

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Q: Can you deﬁne “collective intelligence” and explain its
signiﬁcance to business leaders?
A: Collective intelligence can be deﬁned as groups of individuals acting
collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that deﬁnition, collective
intelligence has existed at least as long as there have been people.
Families, countries, companies and armies are all examples of groups
of people working together in ways that, at least sometimes, seem
intelligent. What is new, however, is that in the last few years we’ve
seen some very new kinds of collective intelligence enabled
by the Internet, and I think we are still in the early stages of leveraging
these new kinds of collective intelligence in business.
In the 20th century, much of business involved relatively routine
industrial processes. In the 21st century, the critical factors in
business success often involve how rapidly a company can innovate,
how quickly it can respond to changing situations. In other words,
the success of a company increasingly depends not just on how
Copyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
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All Rights Collaboration Imperative

efﬁcient it is, but on how intelligent it is. So I think the phrase collective
intelligence helps us direct our attention to some of the issues that are
especially important in our increasingly knowledge-based economy.
Q: What does this mean for executive management styles?
A: They need to move from the traditional view of management as
command and control to a much more ﬂexible view of management,
one I call coordinate and cultivate. By coordinate and cultivate, I
don’t mean the opposites of command and control. I mean the whole
spectrum of possibilities from top down, centralized, command and
control on one end, to bottom up, decentralized, facilitation on the
other end. People who are good at coordinating and cultivating are
good at adapting what they do to the situations in which they ﬁnd
themselves, and moving very ﬂexibly all along that spectrum, from top
down to bottom up, as the situation demands.
Q: What are some of the key considerations for success with
coordination and cultivation?
A: There are two great paradoxes that every executive has to appreciate
and learn. The ﬁrst paradox is what I call the paradox of standards,
which says that sometimes rigid standards can enable more ﬂexibility
and decentralization in other parts of the same system.
A prime example of that is the Internet itself. The Internet Protocol,
or IP, is a rigid standard for how people exchange information over the
Internet. It’s exactly the same everywhere in the world. In part, it’s
precisely because that standard is so rigid that all the other ﬂexibility
and decentralization we associate with the Internet is possible.
In the case of businesses, what we need are standards, perhaps
things like product-quality standards, or service-level agreements or
ﬁnancial-reporting standards. If you can pick the right standards at the
right places, then you can often leave people much more freedom to
do many more things at other levels as long as they meet those standards at the key places you speciﬁed. That’s the paradox of standards.

The other paradox is what I call the paradox of power, which says
that sometimes the best way to gain power is to give it away. For
instance, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, gave power away to
customers. Linus Torvalds, the leader of the Linux open source
software community, gave power away to programmers all over the
world. But in each case, these leaders were rewarded with a different
kind of power. That’s the paradox of power.

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The Challenge of Collaboration

Conventional wisdom holds that a willingness to work
together toward a common goal can make collaboration
work. In most cases, this is not enough.
Collaboration is not easy. Collaborative teams are increasingly virtual, dispersed or cross-functional, and composed of
members who may never have met each other before. Perhaps
they come from different social or cultural backgrounds.
They might come from dysfunctional organizations (and
you certainly don’t want them to bring their bad habits with
them), or for a variety of reasons they may not be fully committed to the team’s work or feel accountable for its success.
Not surprisingly, it’s even harder to build good chemistry in
this new world of virtual teaming.
Given these challenges, collaboration should not be
delivered piecemeal or just be a poster on a wall; it cannot be
introduced with fanfare only to be relegated to the dustbin of
good ideas because of a lack of sustained commitment. There
are things that you can do to improve collaboration immediately, and there are more transformative steps you can take
to build a more collaborative organization in the future.
To evolve more collaborative organizational capabilities,
you will have to cultivate and coordinate three components of
collaboration: culture, process and technology. To that end, the
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three main sections of this book are dedicated to these topics.
It’s a trifecta of change (which is why you can’t depend on just
your IT organization to lead the effort). Your collaborationbuilding effort needs to be led by a collaborative team that
includes leadership from top management, human resources,
marketing and sales, operations, back ofﬁce, research and
development, customer service or other key functions, as well
as representatives from different levels of the organization, to
provide authentic employee perspectives.
Culture, process, technology: Let’s take a quick look at
each one.

COLLABORATION SUCCESS

CULTURE

PROCESS

TECHNOLOGY

Culture

An organization’s culture refers to the people within it
and the norms by which they operate. It’s about how they
treat each other and how they interact and communicate.
Companies that collaborate well share cultural similarities.
Employees trust each other and share information
readily to best serve the needs of the overall business. They
communicate often and openly. They know how to tap
specialized knowledge in other parts of the organization.
31

And they are eager to partner with each other and with others outside of the company.
Collaboration can’t simply be deployed; it needs to be
embraced. And for that, you need your people on board
and committed. We can’t state explicitly enough that this
includes your leaders. Executive buy-in and participation
is imperative. Executives must be willing participants—
modeling collaborative behavior and embracing the technology tools—not just taskmasters.
In our section on culture, we talk about how collaborative
leaders can model behaviors that others in the organization
will follow. We discuss how to foster a culture that
encourages your people to embrace your organization’s most
important priorities and business objectives as the shared
goals everyone works together to achieve. Then we explore
the important role of authentic communication in collaboration by leading you through a self assessment to discover
your own communication style. You’ll also learn how
to recognize the communication preferences of others, as
well as best practices for communicating with the
increasingly diverse and virtual teams on which we all
participate today.
As a culture of collaboration takes hold, it mitigates a
common operational barrier for many companies—internal
competition between departmental, functional or geographical teams for human and ﬁnancial resources. When internal
competition escalates, so do passive-aggressive behaviors
as teams ﬁght for the same limited share of resources and
credit. It promotes knowledge hoarding and needless redundancy that drains corporate resources, distracts workers and
keeps companies from moving quickly. Collaboration does
just the opposite. It exposes the overlaps in your organization
and moves your company from a culture of internal competiCopyright © 2011 Cisco and/or its afﬁliates.
All Rights Reserved. www.thecollaborationimperative.com
The Collaboration Imperative

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tion to a culture of shared goals. This becomes the platform
for achieving business results faster.
Process

Collaboration is not
about automating the
present; it’s about
optimizing the future.

Processes reﬂect the way we get work do…

The Collaboration Imperative provides a great

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