The workplace is constantly evolving. Some changes are an adaptation to disruptions, others are the evolutionary results of a combination of factors. Collaboration has emerged as a strong contender as a practice that can significantly reduce the stress of adaptation, enhance innovation and make any enterprise more competitive. Some research suggests that businesses that integrate collaboration into their business model far outperform their competition. How collaboration can be best utilised in a specific context is not a matter of a simple formula. Collaboration is more a strategy that goes beyond the proverbial ‘how can we work together?”; and thus the need for more education, more research and more thinking in the field. This week’s selection should help if you are seeking answers on how to make your business work better by incorporating collaboration.

Sincere thanks to those who have suggested articles for this edition of Roadmender Recommends.

4 Tools to Help Optimize Your Company’s Culture of Collaboration

Collaboration is the heartbeat of any successful organization. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say your company’s success depends on its culture of collaboration. And while every business has tremendous collaborative potential, it isn’t always being tapped. The use of the right tools can help cultivate these habits. Yes, that’s right — you can now pick from a variety of tools to help up your organization’s collaborative ante…READ ON

Designing collaboration inside a new business

The waterfall model of design may have worked during the birth of the digital era, but our industry has certainly outgrown the linear product development process. Today, more and more companies are abandoning the obsolete waterfall model in favor of Lean and Agile UX methodologies. These more modern approaches value and incorporate collaboration: the first time the developer sets eyes on the project shouldn’t be when they begin coding; the copywriter shouldn’t add text only after the layout design is finalized, etc…READ ON

Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration

DevOps practices originated at startups, where nimble Development and Operations teams pioneered the concept of cross-functional collaboration to speed up software release cycles. By 2009, DevOps became a recognized industry practice: a software development methodology that promised higher velocity for enterprises working to get products to market more quickly. Many enterprises have since embraced DevOps among their software development teams, and early adopters are now taking it beyond code to other parts of their organization…READ ON

What’s the key difference between entrepreneurs and employees?

Around 13% of Americans are starting or running their own companies. Almost everyone else is an employee. We may have found out the difference between the two types. According to a 2013 Swiss-German study, the difference lies in disposition: While an employee is a specialist, an entrepreneur is a jack-of-all-trades. “Entrepreneurs differ from employees in that they must be sufficiently well versed in a whole set of entrepreneurial skills,” write Uschi Backes-Gellner of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and Petra Moog of the University of Siegen in Germany. On the other hand, they say that employees are “specialists who work for others and whose talents are combined with those of other specialists (employees) by the entrepreneurs.”…READ ON

How IBM Plans To Help Reinvent The Modern Corporation

It’s no secret that big corporations are not what they used to be. In recent years, we’ve seen industrial stalwarts such as General Motors, Kodak and Blockbuster go bankrupt even as upstarts like Tesla, Instagram and Netflix prosper. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has fallen from more than 60 years to less than 20…READ ON

What Harvard Business School Has Learned About Online Collaboration From HBX

In June 2014, Harvard Business School launched HBX, its new online education initiative. At the time, the norm, increasingly, in many online courses was to create a “lean back”, individualized experience where students would primarily watch streamed video lectures that centered on experts. Stimulating lectures with star professors, perhaps, but lectures nonetheless — with a passive, individualized learner experience. We wanted to change that…READ ON

New Study Shows 51% Of Managers Have ‘Checked Out,’ Care Little About Their Jobs

If large number of managers are disengaged and giving less than 100 percent to their jobs, how can they expect their employees to be highly engaged and productive? It’s a fair question, and one of numerous troubling issues posed by the new Gallup study, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders. For the study, Gallup surveyed over 2,500 managers. Here’s a high-level overview of their findings…READ ON