Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Rewards

The right sort of collaboration can yield outstanding results, and the book is packed full of fascinating examples from the worlds of business, history and politics that prove this. The secret is to learn how to get the right kind of collaboration, and sometimes that means knowing when not to collaborate.

Now if you work in a complex, multi-departmental organization, this may sound like a tall order. But the book provides a practical, step-by-step guide to achieving effective collaboration.

The author explains the pitfalls of bad collaboration, identifies the barriers to good collaboration, and provides solutions. He draws on examples from household names like Hewlett-Packard and Proctor & Gamble. All this in an easy-to-read, neatly structured book that's peppered with intriguing stories – like the one about the space race. This gives it a universal appeal and makes it an unlikely page-turner.

So, is this book for you? Well, ask yourself this: do infighting and internal politics dog your organization? Is your company wasting time and money on endless networking retreats and team-building exercises that have little impact on results? Do great ideas fail to get off the ground, despite all the resources being in place? If you answered 'Yes' to any of these questions, this book could help you turn things around.

Maybe you're not a leader, but are struggling to get on with your boss or colleagues. You'll find plenty of material in this book to help understand how people work or don't work together, and to help smooth relations.

So, why should we believe Hansen has the answers? Firstly, we can look at the evidence he presents. The author bases his arguments on fifteen years of rigorous research into management practices and collaboration. He bombards readers with case study after case study that all back up his theories.

And his academic credentials certainly stack up. Hansen, formerly of Harvard Business School, not only teaches at Berkeley, but is also a professor at INSEAD in France, one of Europe's leading business schools.

His research into collaboration and management practices has been widely published in top international journals, including Harvard Business Review.

As Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, points out in the foreword to Collaboration, Hansen has a knack for combining science and practice.

So keep listening to hear how Arnold Schwarzenegger went from terminator to collaborator, how co-operation at many levels helped Apple trounce Sony with the iPod, and what it takes to be a master of "disciplined collaboration." Hansen, Norwegian by birth, came up with the idea for the book after studying Hewlett-Packard for his PhD at Stanford University. He saw how collaboration produced great results in some divisions, but totally backfired in others. He went on to survey one hundred and seven companies, interviewed four hundred consultants, and talked to fifty top executives. This is just part of the research that went into the book.

"Collaboration" follows a tight, formulaic structure, making it very easy to read and to refer back to. There's no risk of readers getting lost in this book,despite the wealth of research, information, charts and tables.

This book is divided into three parts: opportunities and barriers, solutions, and a personal challenge to leaders. Within those sections, everything is broken down into bite-sized chunks. For example, steps to disciplined collaboration, four main barriers to collaboration, and three main solutions. Within these sections, you'll read about the six ways to achieve better networks and the three steps to becoming open-minded and inclusive.

Does this formulaic style make for a dry read? Not at all. There's something here for everyone. The author cleverly mixes business and politics, so if you're not too excited by Nissan or Target, maybe you'll be interested in John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. The language is lively too: is your business full of "lone stars" or "butterflies"? How about "bloated rolodexes"? And there are plenty of useful tools, too. For instance, you can rate yourself as a collaborative leader or map your company's networks.

So that's the overview. Now let's take a closer look at some of the highlights. The author begins with a powerful example of the dangers of bad collaboration – and the rewards for getting it right. It's the case of Sony versus Apple, and the race to dominate the market of compact portable music players.

Chances are you'll own an iPod or know someone who does. Apple's iPod, together with its online music store iTunes, is the indisputable king of this market. But how did that happen? Didn't Sony invent the idea of carrying music around in your pocket, with its Walkman, introduced in nineteen seventy-nine? Thanks to the Walkman, Sony was superbly positioned to dominate the market of small portable music players. Instead, it lost out big time to Apple.

According to the author, the iPod's creation was a model of collaboration.

The device itself was a clever combination of existing pieces from different, sometimes rival companies. Apple had to integrate pieces from outside and inside the company, linking hardware and software units.

It was a complex task but all divisions worked together, united by a common goal. They were enthused and passionate about the project. The results were spectacular.

The iPod was launched in 2001 and one million had sold by 2007. Sony tried to fight back but its efforts to compete against the iPod and iTunes bombed.

When Sony launched its Connect online music store in May 2004, it was panned in the press. In 2007, it was pulled from the market.

The author tells how a hyper-competitive culture at Sony, one which had proved highly effective in the past, got in the way of its fight back against Apple. The Connect system required collaboration between five divisions of the company, based in the United States and Japan, but they failed to work together effectively, the author argues.

He concedes that collaboration wasn't the only key to Apple's success and Sony's failure. But it played a huge part.

The author uses this case to illustrate some of the traps that get in the way of collaboration. Where there is too much competition and independence, collaboration tends to fail. On the other hand, people can collaborate too much and can ignore what that costs. Then, leaders can misdiagnose the problem, and come up with the wrong solution.

So what's the answer? Well, the author calls it "disciplined collaboration," and the rest of the book is a step-by-step guide to how to achieve this.

Disciplined collaboration, the author says, is the "leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required." So, it's about identifying the opportunities for collaboration, spotting the barriers, and tearing them down where necessary.

To show the kind of barriers that get in the way of collaboration, the author uses the powerful example of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

The author looks at the US intelligence community, and shows how barriers to collaboration prevented information-sharing that potentially could have stopped the attacks. Drawing on the 9/11 Commission report, the author tells how FBI and CIA agents had nuggets of critical data on the terrorists, but no one joined up the dots.

The size of the intelligence community, the physical distance between agents, and poor communication networks all hindered the exchange of information. The author calls this the "search" barrier. There's also the "hoarding" barrier: agents holding on to information because of a competitive culture or an incentives system that rewards individuals.

This is an eye-opening section that brings home the impact of effective collaboration – and the risks of getting it wrong.

Having identified the barriers, the author offers solutions, which he calls "levers." He names three of these: unify people, cultivate T-shaped management, and build nimble networks. Then he explores each one in depth.

Let's look at the first solution – unifying people. Here, the author uses the 1960s space race between the United States and the Soviet Union to prove his point. President John F Kennedy knew how to unify his government and the American people. His objective was to assert US world leadership, but he needed a more measurable goal that was easy to grasp. At the time, NASA head James Webb said this should be preeminence in space. So JFK chose putting a man on the moon as his goal. It was clearly defined, it stirred passions, and united Americans.

Another secret to successful collaboration is what the author calls T-shaped management. This is a concept thought up by Hansen that's simple yet effective. The vertical part of the T refers to people delivering good results in their own jobs, and the horizontal part is about collaboration across units and the company.

The author goes on to explain how to apply this concept to your business or organization, again in simple steps. He talks about a system of rewards that favors collaboration, about recruitment methods, and about how to change engrained behaviors that endanger collaboration.

The third solution is to build nimble networks. This is an extremely useful section about the pros and cons of networking events and retreats. It's about the differences between good networking and what the author calls "indiscriminate globetrotting," and it'll be of special interest to those who have budgets to meet!

Follow the rules to good networking and you could see more effective collaboration, and save some cash. This section helps you map your company networks and see where the holes are, which ones need to be filled, and which ones can be kept open. Note: not all holes need to be filled!

The final part of the book is about leadership, entitled 'A Personal Challenge'. You may think you're already collaborating well, but chances are you're not.

The author conducted a survey of 162 top-performing managers, along with a colleague, Roger Lehman. The data showed that only 16 percent of managers scored highly on all three behaviors that make up the collaborative style. These are: redefining success in terms of bigger goals, involving others, and being accountable.

To work out where you stand, why not use the author's assessment tool to rate the collaborative style of yourself, a boss, or a colleague? If you don't score highly, you can then follow the author's tips on how to change.

One man who certainly knew how to change was California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The author tells how he began his term of office in true terminator fashion, as a lone hero, taking everyone and everything on, all guns blazing! That is, until he ran into a brick wall. After failing to get his budget proposals approved by the Democrats in the state legislature, he called a special election and asked the public to vote on four proposals. He lost on all four counts!

With his popularity ratings slashed, Schwarzenegger changed tack. He went from terminator to collaborator. The author relates how he apologized for his autocratic style and enlisted Democrats to his top team. He collaborated with them so well that one newspaper called 2006 "one of the most productive legislative sessions in decades." Collaboration brought positive results to Schwarzenegger's administration, to his own standing, and to the people of California.

Maybe Schwarzenegger isn't your ideal role model, but how about JFK? The author describes how Kennedy mastered the art of inclusive decisionmaking during the Cuban missile crisis. He uses this snapshot of a key moment in history to show the benefits of involving others in important decisions, just as long as this is then followed by decisiveness on the part of the leader.

If you're more interested in examples from the world of business, take retail chain Target. As CEO, Robert Ulrich helped Target score a nearly two hundred percent increase in sales between 1994 and 2007. For Ulrich, it was about Target, not about him. The author describes how he redefined success in terms of the company, not his own legacy.

The author concludes the book by stressing the importance of collaboration in today's world. As companies grow and become more global and decentralized, the need for disciplined collaboration will also grow. Here, Hansen makes a passing reference to the Internet. Online collaboration throws up all the same problems as offline collaboration – is it good or bad collaboration? Does it cost too much? Is it a waste of time and money?

The author wraps up by taking us back to the start. Sony, not Apple, should have given us the iPod, he says. The message here is if you want to avoid a similar fate, get collaborating!

In all, "Collaboration" is a lively read that deftly combines science and practice, backed up by a formidable body of research.

Some readers may find the book a little repetitive, and its structure too formulaic and predictable. Some of its assertions and conclusions may also seem obvious. But this same structure makes what could be a complex topic easy to digest, and for every obvious conclusion, there'll be at least one other that you haven't thought of.

Most of all, it's the practical nature of the book that makes it such a valuable tool. If, as the author says, effective collaboration is a necessary requirement for success, then this book is a must read.

"Collaboration" by Morten T. Hansen is published by Harvard Business Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.