Here is a great video from Alstom University on Communities and Collaboration being introduced into large companies...

I'm proud to be part of the team working on this initiative in the group, and pleased to say that the results are already starting to be seen as success stories come through

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVoDJZT-Rnw

Tacit Knowlegde - "We know more than we can tell."

I read an some interesting postings on CollaborativEye on the usefulness of Tacit knowledge to organizations and leadership's role in collaboration.

Imagine a company where everybody's knowledge could be shared quickly and easily to those who need it and didn't even know it existed.

Effectively, we have here the foundations for what might be seen as synergy...
1+1 = 3

It is true that collaboration is not meant to completely replace traditional structures.

We still need leadership and some sense of order if we are to avoid anarchy.

Too many chiefs and not enough Indians could definitely lead to problems.

If everyone is speaking and nobody is listening, this too is a concern.

Leaders need to guide collaborative projects, but should not control the process or it loses its organic strangth.

And as for those who still argue that collaboration is just another craze which isn't practical...

The results are in!

In the debate between collective knowledge sharing versus command ideology,

"Toyota beats Ford"... therefore "Bottom-up beats Top-down"...


What I really liked about the posting on the link provided below was its "how-to" conclusion...

For those who are:
(1) using inefficient interactive tools in their companies, with
(2) only text to communicate and educate instead of images, demos and presentations, and where
(3) many bureaucratic procedures are needed to do anything...

Collaboration may be perceived as being inefficient and inappropriate.

If these three conditions were changed, however, perhaps they would be singing a different tune.
Please feel free to read the orginal postings that inspired this, as well as others, at:
http://www.collaborativeye.com/collaboration_journal/category/collaborative-leadership

Change and icebergs

I recently read a business book by John Kotter called 'Our iceberg is melting'.



In a bubble, the book tells a fable about penguins living on an iceberg who are on the brink of becoming a seal's wet dream, because their iceberg is melting and they don't realise.

One of the penguins discovers a crack in the iceberg, but he is low down in the penguin society, so nobody listens to him.

The head penguins, when he finally gets to talk to them, tell him that he is crazy, and that they know best. For them the iceberg will not melt because it has never melted before.

"What a crazy idea, an iceberg that melts..."

Our penguin who discovered the crack is hence ridiculed and his findings completely ignored, or at least almost.

Luckily, because influential and charasmatic penguins with other specialities actually listened to him, a team was created to come up with a plan to save the colony.

Despite much resistence, they succeeded...

The book is about change, and more notably how it happened from the bottom-up, thanks to the ability of one penguin who discovered the problem to speak to other penguins in the colony with whom he would otherwise never have communicated.


It made me think about why some companies manage to stay so flexible, even though they're huge, and why others don't.

They trust employees (are people-centric), regardless of their level, to solve problems and to share, for example through internal social network tools, their ideas with other people in the company they didn't even know existed...

Others who could use their ideas, or even who could solve their problems for them because they had the same experiences before...

More info on the book can be found at http://www.ouricebergismelting.com/html/iceberg.html

I also recommend this article on the mckinseyquarterly website (it's worth the one minute free registration) for those interested in the future of management... http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Innovative_management_A_conversation_between_Gary_Hamel_and_Lowell_Bryan_2065