Collaboration

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.

When collaboration fails, you fail!

March 11, 2011

After last year’s salmonella outbreak, in which thousands became ill after eating contaminated eggs, a billion of them were pulled from stores. Much of the blame was attributed to poor federal oversight and lack of coordination across federal agencies.

Mick, Keith shine a light

March 7, 2011

Despite their tumultuous relationship, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards decided in 1989 to thrash out how they would hold their band together. Why? Because they were better together than apart.

Enhance your R&D

October 26, 2010

One way you can increase productivity of knowledge workers is by breaking down time barriers. That is, build in time for them to share knowledge. Example: Boston-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals discovered that researchers didn’t have time to share lessons from experiments. So it dubbed a small group of scientists “knowledge intermediaries.”

The risks of going it alone

July 9, 2010
Say the name Burt Bacharach and people think “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” “The Look of Love” or any number of pop hits he wrote with lyricist Hal David into the 1970s.  But, although Bacharach was the more famous of the two, he learned how valuable teamwork is.

Microsoft takes competition too far

May 14, 2010

A little healthy competition can be, well, healthy. Internal competition allowed to go too far, though, can be destructive. Dick Brass, a Microsoft vice president from 1997 to 2004, says that at Microsoft, internal competition has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which big, established groups prey upon emerging teams.

From crayons to water guns: Liven up boring meetings

February 12, 2010

In the downturn, productivity is everything. Small business owners are turning to creative solutions for making conference-room time productive. Here are three examples from “Boring Meetings? Get Out the Water Guns”:

You need more than a gut reaction

February 12, 2010

Leaders sometimes go with their gut when making a decision. Just make sure yours isn’t the only gut being consulted, suggests Reid Carr, president of Red Door Interactive. Here’s one tactic for pulling in the intuition of others: