For leaders to innovate and succeed, collaboration must become part of their playbook and lexicon. It appears that the ability to master collaborative software is a must competency in tomorrow’s world. Can you create and edit web page content without IT support? Can you use a wiki? Are you a web collaborator?
Collaboration means harnessing human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed before. Learning how to collaborate with a shifting set of self-organized partners is becoming an essential skill, as important as planning, budgeting and R&D. A new kind of business is emerging - one that opens its doors to the world, co-innovates with everyone (especially customers), shares resources that were previously well guarded, harnesses the power of mass collaboration, and behaves not as a multinational but as something new: a truly global firm. We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces to increasingly self-organized, distributed, collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge from inside and outside the firm. New principles: The principles of openness, peering and sharing are starting to define how corporations compete.
Two examples: When it came to managing human resources, firms were exhorted to hire the best people, and to motivate, develop, and retain them, since human capital is the foundation of competitiveness. Today, companies that make their boundaries porous to external ideas and human capital outperform companies that rely solely on their internal resources and capabilities. Less than ten years ago more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support projects to aggregate genetic information in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs.
Being competitive means managing global alliances, human capital marketplaces, and peer production communities. People and intellectual assets will need to be managed across cultures, disciplines, and organizational boundaries. Leaders are decentralizing their decision making functions, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies that empower employees to communicate easily with people inside and outside the firm. Winning leaders need to change their thinking completely about managing people. "Instead of trying to set an agenda, "a CEO said, "I’m going to try and discover their agenda, and serve it."