Cooperation vs. Collaboration
More and more businesses are excited about web collaboration capabilities, but until it’s showing them real dollars in return- it’s a lot of optimism…
With that said, I would like you to look at Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University for his description of collaboration at Pixar. He gave a talk entitled “Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace” in which he offers some insight into the true wealth of collaboration—and at the same time gives us a new definition of cooperation.
In the video, he asks you to “think of the assembly line as a quintessential example of cooperation”. Person 1 does his job and the product continues on to person 2…and eventually all of the people on the assembly line have created a final product. We can even assume that they just made one of the best products in the world. BUT, each person in line is not making the quality of the next person’s work any better. They cooperate to finish the job, but their contribution doesn’t really carry on beyond that touch-point.
Cooperation has simply become a “protocol that allows us to not get in each other’s way”…
Collaboration is the flip side of that coin. And it’s where we can impact bottom line. He has created a view within Pixar that collaboration is the AMPLIFICATION of all involved. Your interactions with others become valuable when you are listening to, interested in, and interacting with people on different levels. Let’s suggest that the endgame is, in his words, to get a “hi-fidelity notion” across so that they can all go above and beyond the individual contribution. That seems easy to apply to a company like Pixar, but I’d like to offer you a small business example of collaboration that was directly responsible for increased cash flow.
Giant supermarkets have long generated a friendly competition for store/dept sales, decreasing shoplifting, etc. They developed a closed culture where they didn’t want to share tips for fear of giving their in-company competition any kind of advantage (or from losing their advantage). They used this air of competition to begin innovations within, by collaborating on their intranet. For example, a deli manager discovered a simple display trick that increased their shrimp platter sales by $200/week. When another deli manager used this tip in his store, he also saw the sales increases. This one tip was responsible for a $20K boost, but had they rolled it out company wide in the same time frame they figure it would have been worth $350K. From www.cio.com
What was a day-to-day operation of putting the shrimp out for customers became a chain-wide exercise in practical collaboration. And, quite possibly, the spark to alter views on their internal competition and how it can be redirected to increasing sales.
Everyone likes the idea of continuous improvement, but until you have the communication and buy-in you still have barriers to entry.
