Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos

Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right. Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems–everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers. In “Smart Collaboration,” Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research…READ ON

The Top Collaboration Successes of 2016

2016 has been a happening year in the realm of enterprise collaboration market. While the year saw a lot of new entrants in new age technology spaces, a host of established tech companies realigned their strategies, welcoming more consolidation and collaborative moves. Shared gains were realised, as leaders identified synchronous opportunities to delve in new markets and new geographies. This article outlines some of the most significant collaborative developments that will set the pace for further collaboration in 2017…READ ON

Why Collaboration Will Drive Blockchain’s Success in 2017

The closer the collaboration between developers and commercial organizations, the better the results that emerge. And the closer everybody works with consumers, the more likely it is that the result will be something attractive to them.

This technology is young: the tools to interact with it are designed largely for developers. Creating experiences for consumers is hard, and allowing consumers to interact with it directly can be even harder.

An example: every action on public blockchains requires a transaction fee in a cryptocurrency. It is a small fee, but it is greater than zero. That was acceptable when blockchains were used solely for financial transactions, but today’s use cases have expanded…READ ON

Getting Your Stars to Collaborate

Getting Your Stars to Collaborate

How can you transform a competitive, star-driven culture into a collaborative one? Companies struggle with that question, particularly when knowledge work is the offering. Here’s the underlying tension: Their subject-matter experts must deeply immerse themselves in their disciplines to stay on the cutting edge. And yet that expertise must be integrated across fields and areas of practice to solve the complex problems that today’s customers face.

Can you have it both ways? Yes—by engaging in smart collaboration, which is about producing results, not just playing nicely together in the sandbox…READ ON

Conservation Requires Collaboration

One of the most exciting moments for me in 2016 was President Obama’s decision to expand the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. With 582,578 square miles off the coast of Hawaii designated for permanent protection, the U.S. created the world’s largest protected area, hosting more than 7,000 marine species, many of which are endangered or endemic to the Hawaiian Islands. Papahānaumokuākea provides undisturbed nesting beaches for threatened Hawaiian green turtles and critical habitat for other species of sea turtles, like critically endangered Pacific leatherbacks and hawksbills as well as endangered loggerheads and olive ridleys, offshore. By achieving buy-in from diverse stakeholders to…READ ON