Collaboration

A leadership lesson, set to Mendelssohn

November 14, 2012

When Maestro Wolfgang Heinzel stands before the Merck Orchestra, he may look like an authoritarian leader, commanding musicians from his podium. But Heinzel doesn’t actually know how to play the instruments himself—“in the same way a leader in an organization can’t do everyone’s job,” says Jon Chilingerian. Here is what maestros—and good leaders—understand.

Mayo Clinic’s success secret: teamwork

August 16, 2012

After a diagnosis, patients at the Mayo Clinic meet with a team of specialists who help them understand what’s happening so they can decide about treatment together, says president and CEO Denis Cortese. This kind of teamwork is the stock-in-trade of Cortese, who won last year’s top leadership award from the National Center for Healthcare Leadership.

6 ways to prepare for collaboration

August 7, 2012
As chief of the New York City and Los Angeles police departments, William Bratton experienced firsthand how powerful a force collaboration could be. Bratton offers several principles for leaders to follow in building a collaborative organization:

Secret to winning: Forming alliances

April 19, 2012
In what may become a unifying theory of human behavior, biologist E.O. Wilson is positing a theory that “individual selection,” or competition to thrive and pass along one’s genes, inevitably loses out to “group selection.” Forming alliances has become a fundamental human trait, he says, because “it is a good way to win.”

Making music, not fame

March 22, 2012
Guitar hero Brad Paisley admits that he sometimes finds it hard to relate to young musicians who move to Nashville primarily for fame and fortune. “As I’ve come to understand it, making music isn’t about competition,” he says. “It’s about collaboration. I am a player. And I play with people, not against them.”

Networking a web of talent

March 12, 2012
You may be LinkedIn, but is the talent within your organization linked? When talent can more easily collaborate—and when workers know how to tap into one another’s strengths—the whole organization benefits. Here’s what it looks like in action:

Fight the time suck of collaboration

November 22, 2011

In your role as a leader, working with people is essential, and it takes time. And sometimes, you might be asked to help with something that’s a priority for others, but not for you. The question, says Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, boils down to this: How can we spend time where we add the most value and let go of the rest?

The secret to great partnerships

October 25, 2011
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard have made plenty of terrific movies, including “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13.” Their secret, says former Disney CEO Michael Eisner in his book about partnerships, is freedom from being in lock step.

Maybe it’s time for a breakfast club

September 28, 2011
Four British men together led the scientific world in the early 1800s through a simple device: by meeting every Sunday morning over breakfast to talk about science. The men aimed to launch a new scientific revolution—and they pretty much did. Lesson: Bring together your peers to brainstorm on a regular basis.

Collaborate like Edison

August 25, 2011
Author Sarah Miller Caldicott, great-grandniece of the inventor, is working on a second book about Thomas Edison’s collaboration methods. Edison believed in collaboration not only as a way of accelerating the innovation process, but to expand the solution set, Caldicott says. He liked to create diverse groups of people from diverse disciplines.