Harvard Business Review on Collaborating Effectively
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (202011)

How and why to establish and then nourish mutually high-impact partnerships within and beyond your organization

This is one of the volumes in a series of anthologies of articles that first appeared in HBR. In this instance, its nine articles focus on one or more components of a process by which to join forces to answer the most important questions and to solve the toughest problems.

Having read all of the articles when they were published individually, I can personally attest to the brilliance of their authors’ (or co-authors’) insights and the eloquence with which they are expressed. Two substantial value-added benefits should also be noted: If all of the articles were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be at least $60-75; they are now conveniently bound in a single volume for a fraction of that cost.

Here in Dallas, there is a Farmers Market near the downtown area at which several merchants offer slices of fresh fruit as samples. In that spirit, I now provide a brief excerpt that is indicative of the high quality of all nine articles:

In “Which Kind of Collaboration Us Right for You?” Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti acknowledge that, as potential innovation partners and ways to collaborate with them proliferate, it’s tough deciding how best to leverage outsiders’ power.” Pisano and Verganti recommend understanding the four basic collaboration modes:

• In the open, hierarchical mode, anyone can offer ideas but your company defines the problem and chooses the solution.

• In the open, flat mode, anyone can solicit and offer ideas, and no single participant has the authority to decide what is or isn’t a valid innovation.

• In the closed, hierarchical mode, your company selects certain participants and decides which ideas get developed.

• In the closed, flat mode, a select group is invited to offer ideas. But participants share information and intellectual property and make critical decisions together.

Other articles I especially enjoyed include Morten T. Hansen’s “When Collaboration is Bad for Your Company,” Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson’s “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” Roger Martin’s “The Execution Trap,” and Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis’ “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership.”

If asked to select only one book that provides the most valuable material to supplement what is offered in this volume, it would be Morten Hansen’s Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, published by Harvard Business School Press (2009). In it, Hansen explains why “bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration.” Here are two of several reasons. First, bad collaboration never achieves “big results”; worse yet, bad collaboration makes good collaboration even more difficult to plan and then achieve. Hansen explains how to create a culture of collaboration while accelerating the development of high-impact teams.