Collaboration is not the hottest trend for 2016
Posted by Janice Scheckter on 13 January 2016, 06:50 CAT
Content and the re-emergence of email marketing are trends. Video content is a trend. Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) (1) is a trend. Collaboration is an era, it’s an economy and mostly it’s a global operating system.
Businesses, organisations, cities and metros that have been collaborating for many years continue to flourish in an environment that supports collaboration and a socio-economic era that demands it.
In the early 2000s P&G, having suffered billions of dollars in losses, appointed a CEO. His single focus was collaboration. A.G.Lafley promised to make P&G the most collaborative company inside and out. Some of the outcomes included astounding product innovation. Many organisations model themselves today on Lafley’s collaborative leadership style. On stepping down, having doubled P&G’s size to $83.5 billion in less than a decade, Fortune described Lafley as one of the very few hero CEOs.
Following Detroit’s declaration of bankruptcy in early 2013, the city’s high-speed turn around is being watched carefully by other cities around the world. “The cooperation, partnership and leadership here provide a blueprint for cities around the world,” writes Peter Scher, of JP MORGAN CHASE. When one does some digging into the Detroit story, it’s really one about collaboration of business people passionate about the city of Detroit, committed local leadership and the broader community.
So when I talk about collaboration being a global operating system, it becomes a critical part of operations. Collaboration is about intent, behavioural changes, an underpinning ethos of trust and shared purpose.
Are you operating at optimal collaboration as an organisation? Step one is to incorporate collaboration into leadership’s intent. If it’s to become part of the organisation’s ‘operating system’ – this, at the very least, is the starting point.
Janice Scheckter, co-founder of Indigo New Media believes that collaboration will change the world, one community at a time.
(1) (WEB Real-Time Communication) A browser-based programming interface (API) from the W3C for voice and video calling that bypasses the traditional telephone networks. Introduced in 2011 as open source software by Google, by 2014, WebRTC was added to Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers. WebRTC also supports data sharing.
