At what point does collaboration just become “collaboration for collaboration’s sake?” Can collaboration actually be detrimental to a companies performance? When should my team pursue cross-company collaboration, and when should we “go it alone?”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/collaboration_is_misunderstood.html

The above article by Harvard Business Review tackles these questions by proposing a single (rather broad) criteria for determining when to pursue cross-company collaboration:

… 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.

The author then defines three conditions for success in collaborative relationships:

• the participants have committed to work together — collaboration requires emotional engagement;
• the participants have high respect for each other’s competence on the topic of the collaboration or a natural first-among-equals exists amongst the participants, because of technical knowledge or experience; and
• the participants have the skills and permission to creatively bargain with each other over costs and benefits.

The main argument that he uses to defend his point is that dedicated teams and customer-supplier relationships have “clear mechanisms for resolving disagreements,” and that you should only pursue collaborative relationships when the benefit is worth discarding these existing mechanisms.

While this article comes across as generally pessimistic about the value of collaborative relationships within companies, I think that it raises the following interesting questions in the context of the course:

1. What should the conditions for establishing successful collaboration be, and are the conditions mentioned here too restrictive or too broad? What (if anything) is missing?
2. How does a manager decide whether pursuing a collaborative relationship will result in a strategic advantage, or when it is simply “collaboration for collaboration’s sake?”
3. Is it fair for upper management to demand that employees “collaborate” without defining clear bounds or conditions under which collaboration can be successful? Is finding good conditions for collaboration the responsibility of managers or of employees (or both), and how would we evaluate Intuit’s “collaborate or perish” style of performance evaluation in that respect?
4. How do these conditions play out for Network organizations, where collaborations might not be carefully curated by upper management and dedicated teams change frequently? How could we design networked organizations from the ground up to foster these conditions?

Thoughts?

– Mark