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

Before the BMW X5 Sports Activity Vehicle rolled off the Spartanburg, South Carolina production line in the final months of the last century, the automaker's standard time to market was sixty months. But this new vehicle had defied the standard. Thirty five months earlier, the X5 was nothing more than a concept. BMW had slashed time to market almost in half. What had changed?

The X5 was the first BMW vehicle completely developed and produced through telecooperation. BMW defined telecooperation as technology-supported collaboration and communication allowing globally-distributed teams to design and produce a product. Also, the automaker was moving from a "sequential" to a "parallel" development process in which the second phase of design begins before the first phase ends.

During the last several hectic months before the X5 launch, BMW invited me to visit its design center in Munich. There a spark flew that ignited the idea for the first edition of this book. BMW's experience was an early manifestation of The Culture of Collaboration.

While BMW was deserializing development and production of the X5, something similar was beginning at Boeing. In trailers outside Boeing's engineering center in Everett, Washington, an "open-minded" group collectively called the Airplane Creation Process Strategy (ACPS) team began with a "fresh sheet of paper." The cross-functional group would reconsider how the company develops the most complex product a modern society produces. Boeing would ultimately deserialize development and production of the 787 Dreamliner. This would entail a global collaborative enterprise of partners working in concert to design and produce the aircraft.

The BMW X5 and the Boeing 787 program were outliers when the first edition of this book appeared. So were the Mayo Clinic and Industrial Light & Magic in their industries.

In most organizations at the time, a consciousness barely existed for collaborative work styles and business models. Most companies embraced command and control as standard operating procedure. The first edition examined outlier organizations that were achieving substantial value through collaboration. This was typically happening in specific areas of these companies, and it appeared that collaboration would spread and that entire organizations would adopt The Culture of Collaboration. Instead, collaboration has stalled.

Since this book's first edition, the world has experienced the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. These and other exigent circumstances have compelled the adoption of collaborative organizational structures. Now consciousness for collaboration pervades organizations and society.

Yet in some ways we're less collaborative than we were in the early 2000s. How can this be? In short, The Culture of Collaboration lags behind the consciousness for collaboration.

Social media lets us broadcast opinions without refining ideas through real-time interaction. We join groups that make rules for how we should think. Videoconferencing enables interaction at a distance, but too often we're wasting time in scheduled virtual meetings rather than creating value together spontaneously. While in the same room, we meet rather than collaborate.

While many companies have reduced silos within their operations, organizations have themselves become silos walled off from customers and communities. Try contacting somebody you don't know in a large organization, and you're unlikely to receive a response. In the early 2000s, most people answered their phones no matter who was calling. No appointment necessary.

Paradoxically, collaboration happens in organizations in which the dominant culture is command and control. Likewise, internal competition and command-and-control exist in mostly-collaborative organizations. And it turns out that The Culture of Collaboration is dynamic. Organizations may take a step forward, take a step or two back, then perhaps take two steps forward. Many factors play a role including the pressure for short-term results over longer-term value creation. Yet if a company achieves success through collaboration, we can utilize its approach and methods regardless of whether the pendulum may have swung back to a less-collaborative culture at that organization.

This expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® revisits companies examined in the first edition—Toyota, Boeing, Industrial Light & Magic and the Mayo Clinic. These organizations achieved early success through collaboration. The book explores how collaboration has evolved in these organizations and has taken hold in others. Our challenge: learning from these collaboration journeys and applying this knowledge elsewhere.

In the case of Boeing, this edition takes a deeper dive—enabled by candid and unprecedented interviews with key leaders—into collaboration on the 787 program. Despite some turbulence, the 787 remains a significant example of mass-scale global partner collaboration. This edition also includes two new chapters. "Collaborating with Robots and Intelligent Agents" presents a new cultural challenge and "The Brave New World of Trust and Security" addresses issues in protecting partner collaboration.

As these pages reveal, closing the gap between the consciousness for collaboration and The Culture of Collaboration requires more than a commitment to collaborative culture. Rather, adopting principles, practices and processes rooted in collaboration and deserialization make The Culture of Collaboration happen.