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INTRODUCTION - The Culture of Collaboration® – Expanded and Updated Edition

Global has become a dirty word. And for good reason. Companies have embraced globalization to outsource jobs, manufacture where labor is cheap and ship finished products across continents. Talk about impacting climate change. With rising energy and transportation costs, shipping products across the world wastes resources. Legacy globalization is nothing more than a focus on short-term results over longer-term value creation.

In contrast, The Culture of Collaboration sparks sustainable globalization. Federated companies participate in developing, producing, delivering and supporting products and services regardless of geography. Working in concert and tapping diverse talent from different countries and cultures creates infinitely more value than exploiting cheap labor.

And the worldwide quest for lower-cost labor becomes unnecessary for another reason: collaborative robotics discussed in chapter 6. Using precision in completing mundane tasks, the cobots do their part. Meantime, their human collaborators rely on analysis and judgment in accomplishing the goal. People working side-by-side with cobots can create substantial value by keeping manufacturing closer to customers and keeping people working.

Creating a universe of globally-distributed business partners, organizations can operate as a single enterprise round-the-clock. These partnering companies form the global collaborative enterprise, covered in chapter 10. Despite the incredible value that collaboration creates, why are we still struggling to achieve tasks and goals alone? Our collective culture, particularly in the United States, perpetuates the Myth of the Single Cowboy. This is the notion that one self-sufficient, rugged individual can achieve smashing success without help from anybody. Consider our preoccupation with celebrity. We turn artists, athletes, chefs, politicians, surgeons, influencers, television hosts, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and many others into stars. This tendency creates the impression that we accomplish great feats by ourselves.

In fact, a meal in an upscale restaurant is often the work of an executive chef, sous chef, line cooks, prep people, expeditors, servers and others. And without an anesthesiologist and nurses, a surgeon— not to mention the patient—would be in trouble. The bigger the "star power" of an artist, the more likely the art is the product of many apprentices. The world's best quarterback needs wide receivers, running backs, tight ends, and offensive linemen. Batman needs Robin. And even the Lone Ranger needs his side- kick, Tonto.

Many organizations reinforce the Myth of the Single Cowboy by embracing a star culture. Such cultures reward people for competing with colleagues. The primary motivator often becomes fear rather than value creation. In these environments, getting ahead requires hoarding ideas and information. Why share knowledge with competitors? In such cultures, opportunities to deserialize time, talent and tools die on the vine.

The Culture of Collaboration is about turbocharging business models and changing organizational DNA. Collaborative organizations promote sharing over hoarding, trust over fear, community over isolation, spontaneity over scheduling, and diversity over homogeneity. With these and other principles, we can more easily adopt practices and processes that replace linear, serial business models with concurrent, real-time approaches that are infinitely more compelling.

Deserialization and The Culture of Collaboration are inextricably intertwined. Rather than designing parts individually and later assembling them into a product, we can visualize and design parts, plans, tools, products, manufacturing processes and the entire product lifecycle all at the same time. Instead of conducting vaccine trials and later mass producing doses and then arranging distribution, we can perform these steps in parallel. In service industries, it's a similar story. We can include people from multiple functions in developing services and processes. They can participate simultaneously, instead of passing work product from one function to the next or sending information and requests through levels and functions.

With the expectation of enhancing efficiency or mitigating distance, organizations may adopt the right processes, systems, strategies and tools to enable collaboration. In many cases, however, their efforts come up short. Collaboration may occur, but only sporadically. Something is missing.

Managers may blame the lack of collaboration on hybrid work or technological issues. And, in fact, technology plays a role. Yet in most cases the overwhelming reason why collaboration eludes organizations involves culture. This book's fundamental premise is that deserializing time, talent and tools to create value requires the principles, practices, and processes of The Culture of Collaboration.

Without a Culture of Collaboration, the best processes,
systems, tools, and leadership strategies fall flat.

Whether times are tough or business is booming, we can turbocharge any business model by collapsing wasteful steps and adopting concurrent design of the entire product or service lifecycle. This is the essence of deserialization.

Let's begin by examining deserialization and the sweeping changes that are once again redefining work, business models, and organizations.

DESERIALIZING TIME, TALENT AND TOOLS
TO CREATE VALUE IN THE
LOCAL AND GLOBAL ECONOMY