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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
How Thomas Edison's system for collaboration can benefit any team Thomas Edison created multi-billion dollar industries that still exist today. What many people don't realize is that his innovations were generated through focused approaches to teamwork and collaboration. Authored by the great grandniece of Thomas Edison, Midnight Lunch provides an intriguing look at how to use Edison's collaboration methods to strengthen live and virtual teams today. Edison's four phases of collaboration success offer a simple yet powerful way to see how different combinations of live and digital resources can multiply results and deliver outstanding ROI now. * Shows how to draw together individuals from diverse disciplines, ensuring multiple perspectives and rapid problem-solving * Explains how to mix specialists and generalists on the same team, preventing groupthink and discouraging a culture of "superstars" * Reveals the steps needed to reskill team members for collaboration in the digital era Team members from any field can take Midnight Lunch to their project meetings, engage instantly, identify action steps based on the book, and generate high-impact results.
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Seitenzahl: 359
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: What Is True Collaboration?
Is It True Collaboration, or Is It a Team?
Team A versus Team B
Thomas Edison Mastered Collaboration as a Force for Success
Tracing Edison’s Collaboration Beliefs and Practices
Edison’s Four Phases of True Collaboration
True Collaboration Fosters a Growth Mindset: Balancing Learning and Performance
True Collaboration Is a Superskill That Builds a New Type of Knowledge Asset
Chapter 2: Why Is True Collaboration So Crucial Now?
Shift #1: The Rise in Complexity Due to Massive Generation of Data and Real-Time Data Synthesis
Shift #2: The Rise of the Metalogue as a Tool for Creating Purpose and Connection
Shift #3: The Need for Reskilling Workers in the Innovation Age
Chapter 3: Phase 1
Part i, Phase 1—Capacity
Part ii, Phase 1—Capacity
True Collaboration Toolkit: Hands-On Exercises—Phase 1
Chapter 4: Phase 2
Part i, Phase 2: The Solo Meld
Part ii, Phase 2: Group Meld
True Collaboration Toolkit: Hands-On Exercises—Phase 2
Chapter 5: Phase 3
Part i, Phase 3: Coherence
Part ii, Phase 3: Coherence
True Collaboration Toolkit: Hands-On Exercises—Phase 3
Chapter 6: Phase 4
Part i, Phase 4: Complex Systems and Smart Layers
Part ii, Phase 4: Footprinting Captures Collective Intelligence
Chapter 7: True Collaboration
About the Author
Index
Cover image: Clock: ©Daniel Sanchez Blasco/iStockphoto; Thomas Edison: Courtesy of National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site.
Cover design: C. Wallace
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Miller Caldicott. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
Thomas Edison’s Five Competencies of Innovation™ is a registered trademark of Sarah Miller Caldicott © 2007.
Thomas Edison’s Four Phases of True Collaboration™ is a registered trademark of Sarah Miller Caldicott © 2012.
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With deepest love to my husband, Wayne
When you honor me, you are also honoring the vast army of workers but for whom my work would have gone for nothing.
—Thomas Alva Edison
Foreword
I first met Sarah following a speech she delivered in 2011 at a high-level innovation leadership conference hosted by Kraft. I was immediately struck by the relevance of her teachings. As a cofounder of Brightidea, a company that focuses on tools to harness innovation, I was captivated by Sarah’s presentation. Her understanding of innovation practices used by Thomas Edison, and the links between those practices and today’s urgent need to continually innovate, sheds light on how some of the world’s most revolutionary inventions came to be. And critically, how Edison’s practices might be successfully contemporized and translated today.
In Midnight Lunch, Sarah brings Edison’s timeless collaboration formula to the fore. She advances our understanding of the rapidly changing innovation environment by providing deep insight into Edison’s proven collaboration processes. Importantly, her teachings allow innovation practitioners to apply those proven practices in the digital era. Sarah notes that Edison emphasized collaboration as a discovery learning process, which served as the backbone of his innovation efforts. Rather than adopting a classroom-focused or task-focused orientation, collaboration for Edison was highly hands on, experiential, and project-driven. His teams learned through interaction with their colleagues, allowing them to unlock their own innate creativity and enhance ideas through collaborative adaptation. Sarah shows us how to inject Edison’s undeniably brilliant insight into the collaborative process.
Sarah’s insights could not come at a better time. Those companies that successfully innovate continue to flourish. But companies that fail to innovate risk their very survival. Almost 50 percent of companies that made the 1999 Fortune 500 list (238 companies to be exact) were absent from the 2009 list due to dramatic falls in revenues. Extend that history, and the results become even more onerous: only 71 companies listed as part of the original 1955 Fortune 500 have survived to grace today’s 500. The world has become a tougher place, and the corporate playing field is littered with companies that failed to make the grade through successful innovation. I think of Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak Company, Borders, and Hostess Brands as recent examples. To survive, companies can no longer rely on past successes. Rather, surviving in an ever-changing global economy requires continual, effective, culturally embedded innovation and collaboration approaches.
Sarah describes Edison’s collaboration process as being composed of four interlocking phases: capacity, context, coherence, and complexity. One thread running through the phases is an intriguing discussion of metalogue, a method of inquiry for exploring diverse conversations and the context around those conversations. Sarah speaks to the emerging role of technological advancements and digital links among teams around the world as a component of metalogue, allowing companies to activate innovation and collaboration in rapid and scalable ways. Sarah’s comments about this process align with our own experience developing the Innovation Grid, a concept championed at Brightidea. A platform now touching almost every part of the world, the grid creates online channels of deep communication and collaboration, resulting in a marketplace of new ideas. The grid also provides methods to predictably repeat the innovation process by allowing companies to focus collaborators in many different geographies, from start-ups like Kickstarter and 99Designs, to established companies such as GE and P&G, which are fostering open innovation.
But where does collaboration come from? How do companies develop collaborative structures that help drive future brand loyalty, market share, and profitability? The innovation process is a creative activity. What Edison seems to have realized is that, first, everyone is creative and, second, that if properly nurtured, the most important assets of a company—its employees and customers—can generate a constant stream of good ideas that connect to needs. To do so, companies must develop a culture that nurtures creativity, addresses customer needs, and strives to apply the good ideas that percolate upward like so many diamonds. People can be taught to innovate. They can be taught to recognize the creative gifts that they have been given and to apply those gifts. As Edison shows us, what they need is leadership, a collegial environment, and inspired direction.
In recent years, the infrastructure to frame, nurture, and positively motivate innovation has significantly improved. Companies no longer need just a factory floor, a research and development (R&D) department, or a physical data center to innovate. Instead, as Sarah reveals in Midnight Lunch, we are finding new ways to link internal resources like these to external networks, jointly creating new context for solutions and new smart networks. In essence, we are innovating ways in which we all innovate. Online collaboration, social media innovation processes, and cloud-based capabilities allow companies to reach out to employees, customers, and other stakeholders to encourage creativity, explore needs, and foster idea generation within a focused framework. Using the smart layers that Sarah describes in the complexity phase, for example, it’s now possible to track a variety of innovation metrics from idea generation to social interactions to implementation rates and a host of other insights, all wrapped around a particular product, service, or challenge-focused topic.
If Edison were alive today, he would be fascinated by the evolution of the innovation process. Using new combinations of human capital and technology, we enjoy higher levels of innovation predictability—outcomes Edison would have applauded. Edison would revel in the Internet as a method of encouraging collaboration in ways never before possible, approaches that allow tens of thousands of collaborators to connect to a single live team. But despite the opportunities that the Internet offers, Edison would still insist that collaboration must have a human core. Focused conversations, leadership, and human interaction are necessary to produce great, successful, market-changing ideas.
Sarah understands the deep, inner workings of this process. She deftly delves into Edison’s true collaboration formula, empowering companies to better use collaboration as a disruptive tool. Midnight Lunch offers a fitting and timely message that sets the stage for individuals and companies to incorporate collaboration into an innovation framework, delivering powerful results that drive competitive advantage, disruptive business models and technologies, and long-term success in challenging times.
—Matthew Greeley
Chief executive officer and cofounder, Brightidea
Acknowledgments
An entire constellation of people contributed to the thinking behind Midnight Lunch.
My deep thanks to the innovators who prompted me to delve more deeply into Edison’s collaboration methods, seeking to trace applications between his genius and the pressing needs of the twenty-first century: Harun Asad, Kevin Bennet, Buckley Brinkman, Dr. Jacqueline Byrd, Dr. Curt Carlson, Dr. Jean Egmon, Pia Erkinheimo, Art Fry, Ted Grabau, Matthew Greeley, Richard Guha, Anthony Gyursanszky, Verne Harnish, Larry Keeley, Braden Kelley, Renu Kulkarni, Ray Kurzweil, Dr. Robert Langer, Wayne Lindholm, Robert Lowe, Moises Norena, Richard Perrin, Chuck Peters, Carol Phillips, Robert W. Schmidt, Maria Thompson, and Rishad Tobaccowala.
I’m also grateful to the many business leaders who offered their insights into key specialty areas that directly link to collaboration and shared their thoughts on how teams affect the role of leadership in a collaborative setting: Tom Barwin, Guy Blissett, Vincent Carbone, John Copenhaver, Greg Cox, Emily DeRocco, Dr. Ashok Patel, Jay Scherer, Jason Sherman, Daryl Travis, Craig Wortmann, and Jim Ziganto.
In addition, of huge importance were the individuals who served as resources for historical references to Edison’s life and legacy and the power of his ideas, which endure undiminished even now. A big thank-you to Michele Wehrwein Albion, whose seminal book The Quotable Edison served as a font of historically verified quotes from Edison. I also wish to deeply acknowledge the contributions of Leonard DeGraaf, Dr. Paul Israel, Rachel Weissenburger, The Thomas A. Edison Papers staff at Rutgers University, and The Thomas Edison National Historic Park staff.
My thanks to all those who assisted in compiling the manuscript for Midnight Lunch, both in its early and its later forms: Nina Fazio, Matt Holt, Adrianna Johnson, Linda Kooper, Elizabeth Londo, Stanton B. Miller III, Susan Moran, and Janelle Noble. I would also like to specially acknowledge Michael J. Gelb, coauthor of my first book, Innovate Like Edison, who encouraged me to keep writing.
And a final word of gratitude to my children, Nicholas and Connor, for spurring me on in the quest to keep the Edison legacy alive in our family, bringing his thinking to a new generation of innovative and collaborative leaders.
Introduction
When we call Thomas Edison to mind, our first thought is of a brilliant inventor and innovator whose creations transformed modern life. We often think of him toiling away in a laboratory all by himself, long into the wee hours of the morning.
And yet, we rarely consider the role that collaboration played in Edison’s world-changing success. Tangled in the lore of the lone American inventor, our mind’s eye conjures up Edison’s spray of white hair and his signature bow tie, quickly ascribing his 1,093 US patents to innate genius.
Tempting as it is to sustain this image of Edison, it is inaccurate. In an age when many speak of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs in the same breath, it’s important to refresh our understanding of the pivotal role collaboration played in Edison’s innovation prowess. He viewed collaboration as the beating heart of his laboratories, a sustaining resource that fueled the knowledge assets of his sprawling innovation empire.
Rising from humble beginnings, Edison was largely self-educated, pursuing his relentless passion for learning well into his seventies, when he taught himself botany. Deeply skilled in chemistry, telegraphy, acoustics, materials science, and electromechanics, Edison’s thirst for discovery began in his early teens and never ceased. Like a magnetic force all its own, Edison’s brainy leanings drew others to his quests, attracting bright colleagues with a huge diversity of skills.
From his earliest years renting space in workshops and small laboratories, Edison collaborated with others. Realizing the value of sharing his inspirations with people who held different skills than he did, Edison felt a unique bond with those who labored with him. After establishing his famed Menlo Park Laboratory at the age of 29, Edison journeyed from the failure of his first patented invention at age 22 to becoming a world-renowned inventor in just nine years, establishing collaboration practices that came to be a signature of his campus-style operations.
But this book is not intended to be a historic regurgitation of Edison’s accomplishments. Rather, it aims to remind us of what is possible when we strive toward a purpose that unites us with others, providing a roadmap for how twenty-first century teams can become more collaborative. Edison’s dedication to collaboration crystallizes what we are capable of at our best. His astonishing contributions inspire us to achieve more, to embrace more, to explore the richness of our mental capacities. Edison’s achievements consistently defied the boundaries of what the scientific community believed was possible—indeed, what was believed to be humanly possible. Midnight Lunch challenges each reader to examine their professional or personal ambitions, reimagining what one person is capable of producing when working in true collaboration.
Midnight Lunch also offers a deeper view of the collaboration competency identified in my first book, Innovate Like Edison: The Five-Step System for Breakthrough Business Success. Innovate Like Edison explores what I call Edison’s Five Competencies of Innovation, laying out the mindset, creative processes, work culture, value creation practices, and team engagement approaches Edison consistently applied. Midnight Lunch takes a step-by-step look at how collaboration served as the connective tissue binding Edison’s masterful innovation process together, becoming its sinews, its tendons, and its very muscle fiber. Without the culture of collaboration he created, it is unlikely Edison could have achieved the breakthrough innovation success whose impact we still feel today.
The linkage between innovation and collaboration underscores why Edison’s collaborative approach becomes such a relevant subject for us now. Given the increased scrutiny placed on the role of innovation as a driver of growth for every economy, whether emerging or developed, we must ask whether collaboration is also engaged. Like a symbiotic organism that can thrive only when its host is present, innovation can gain sustainable traction only when true collaboration also exists.
As you will read, we are living in what has been described as the third economic revolution in human history, dubbed by many as the Innovation Age. This massively transformational era is projected to last just 30 years, a period 10 times shorter than the Industrial Age, which preceded it. Perhaps even more challenging, 10 of those 30 years have already expired. At a time when inexpensive yet hugely powerful digital technologies rest at our fingertips, the Edisonian spirit calls us to maximize the brilliance and innate creativity that lies within each of us to tackle the major problems we face worldwide. Edison’s timeless innovation and collaboration processes remind us that we can look at the next two decades as an era in which true collaboration can thrive, allowing us to mirror his passion for discovery learning and the thrill of conquering new frontiers.
The kinship I hold with the Edison legacy is a unique one. My great-great-aunt, Mina Miller, married Thomas Edison in 1886, when she was 20 years old and he was 39. As the daughter of an inventor, my great-great-grandfather, Lewis Miller, Mina had glimmerings of the quirks and eccentricities that often accompany a brilliant mind. Her faithful love and companionship served as fuel for Edison’s seemingly inexhaustible energy for work. My aim in Midnight Lunch is to propel this unique legacy into the Innovation Age, contemporizing methods that placed Edison ahead of his time even during the most fruitful era of US innovation. By delving into the collaboration practices of one of the world’s foremost thinkers, we can all find new fuel for grappling with today’s daunting global challenges.
If Edison were alive now, he would be harnessing the power of digital networks and smart devices to collaborate on a new scale. He would evangelize the notion of flat teams and flat organizations, philosophies he instituted in his own laboratories. Edison would remind us to find the value creation opportunities that emerge from asking new, probing questions and sending small, dedicated collaboration teams in search of the answers. As well, he would drive us forward—relentlessy.
This book endeavors to reveal the spirit and the collaboration practices Edison would bring us in the Innovation Age. His inventions touched more than half the people on the planet during his lifetime—and virtually every single person today. I hope you will use Midnight Lunch as a spur to transform your own beliefs about what is possible through collaboration and newly engage them in your daily endeavors.
—Sarah Miller Caldicott
Great-grandniece of Thomas Edison
Chapter 1
What Is True Collaboration?
Gravity is one of the most pervasive forces in the universe. Physicists classify it among the most unique phenomena ever discovered, essential to shaping planets, stars, and solar systems. We recognize the impact of gravity everywhere—its pull on water coursing through riverbeds, its mastery of the wind whistling across sheer mountain slopes, and its ability to hold buildings, cars, and people on Earth’s surface.
Gravity’s more subtle properties, however, have caused it to be less studied. Gravity is relatively less understood by the scientific community than other forces.1 When compared with the awesome power of fission, vividly demonstrated in an atomic bomb or an exploding star, gravity works softly, and with a more velvet hand.
Collaboration has shared a similar fate. Like gravity, collaboration is a pervasive force. It lies at the heart of what uniquely shapes teams and organizations. It connects people to the vast power of their own knowledge and shines a light on the purpose of their work and their lives. Collaboration holds the power to link teams with diverse skills and traits, urging them to come together in an aligned way and yielding breakthroughs that can impact hundreds—even millions—of people.
Yet collaboration as a business force remains less visible than others dominating today’s headlines. It feels less tangible than gyrations in stock or bond prices, less sexy than deals hammered out in a corporate merger. It doesn’t rivet our attention like the jaw-dropping price tag of a hot Internet start-up.
But that is about to change.
In the next decade, as the planet absorbs the impact of a population topping 8 billion, we will see the entry on the global stage of a new, young workforce totaling in the hundreds of millions.2 As cellular phones and smart technologies come within reach of more young minds in Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, and Africa, as well as the United States and other developed economies, unprecedented levels of connectivity will exist across the planet.3 Like a giant pulsing brain, a new kind of collective intelligence will become possible by the end of the decade, redefining how knowledge networks operate and how microcosms of people drive value-creating activity across vast geographies as well as entire organizations. Rather than being an afterthought, collaboration will underpin virtually every business practice that exists today.
Rishad Tobaccowala, vice president (VP) of innovation at global media group VivaKi, puts it this way: “Among the top three things organizations must focus on right now are (1) staying relevant, (2) innovating, and (3) attracting and retaining talent. Collaboration is crucial to all three.”4 Greg Cox, president of the third largest network for Dale Carnegie’s vast global leadership training operations, echoes this view, emphasizing that collaboration is a surging phenomenon that will newly balance the skills of the individual with the power of collective action. “The future will not be based on individuals, but on extraordinary combinations of people.”5
Are you ready to collaborate? Do the teams within your organization understand what it means to collaborate? Can you describe how you would harness collaboration to tap the emerging power of what has been termed the “next billion workers,” or how you would position collaboration as a driver of value creation in your business? What structures are required to accelerate collaboration and link it to other practices? What barriers to collaboration exist that beg your attention?
This book addresses these questions, revealing the core skills and strategies you can begin using to master “true collaboration.” True collaboration, a new term that embraces the research revealed throughout Midnight Lunch, can unlock the potential that lies not only within yourself but within every team in your organization. True collaboration can revolutionize the culture of your workplace or your community, connecting people through new types of team experiences that create collective knowledge and a commitment to shared purpose.
Almost all important decisions are now made in teams, either directly or through the need for teams to translate individual decisions into action.
—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
True collaboration can transform the way you grow as an individual, the way teams in your organization innovate, the way teams connect with customers, and the way value is delivered in your operation both now and for the long term.
IS IT TRUE COLLABORATION, OR IS IT A TEAM?
Part of where we go astray in our basic understanding of collaboration itself lies in our diverse definitions for team. At the most basic level, we recognize teams as groups of two or more people, working toward a shared outcome or common goal. But teams seem to be everywhere today. They pervade the world of sports. We see teams operating in local clubs, urban communities, and professional associations. Are they all really functioning the same way?
Part of our confusion surrounding teams also traces to an expanding ability for groups of people to operate remotely from one another. Today, people who don’t live or work in the same geographic area can operate as a team by connecting online. Virtual team members can be 3, 30, 300, or even 3,000 miles apart from one another. In fact, a major 2011 study conducted by Forrester Consulting revealed that more than one-third of US companies are using virtual teams, with 40 percent of employees involved in some type of virtual team structure—a percentage expected to rise to 56 percent in the next three years.6 However, many organizations are finding that distance becomes a relevant—and limiting—factor when team members are separated by more than three time zones, after which extensive use of smart technologies and social networks is needed to mitigate the gap.7
With team members operating in so many different environments, are people actually collaborating? Are they connecting in ways that magnify their individual skills? By having a Skype conference with colleagues halfway around the world, is true collaboration being engaged? If I’m using social media, am I collaborating?
And what about committees or task forces? What about new product development teams or accounting groups? Or the fluid relationships between people in social networks? Do these teams represent true collaboration—or could they?
This book addresses these diverse questions and seeks to create a distinction between what we commonly understand as teamwork and the broader role of true collaboration as a core practice within an organization. It also lays out step by step how you can begin recalibrating your approach to collaboration itself, designing powerful teams that deliver deeper levels of creativity and productivity for the long term.
TEAM A VERSUS TEAM B
To illustrate some of the key differences between teamwork and true collaboration, consider the example of a pair of two-person teams: Team A and Team B. Imagine they each have one member who is 5 feet tall and another who is 6 feet tall. Team A has been tasked with traveling together from one end of a football field to the other in less than 10 minutes. Team A’s members respond by simply clasping hands and running side by side from one end zone to the other, easily achieving their goal of reaching the opposite end zone within the allotted time.
Now, imagine that Team B is given the same assignment. But Team B elects to travel the length of the field side by side in what is called a three-legged race. The left leg of one person must be bound to the right leg of the other person. Suddenly, unlike Team A, the members of Team B face a different context for running the length of the field. They must grasp each other’s shoulders just to keep their balance. They must determine the best place to bind their legs together so that they can move in unison. Simply making a left-right-left-right running motion doesn’t make sense any more. Even the height of the two individuals now becomes a factor in traversing the football field without falling down. The members of Team B must actively talk, strategize, and use trial-and-error methods to move a mere 15 yards.
However, by the time Team B reaches the 50-yard line, they’ve discovered how to move more efficiently. They’ve learned how to leverage the resources of both the taller and the shorter team member. Picking up speed with each three-legged stride, Team B streaks to the finish line within the 10-minute time allotment.
What are the differences between how Team A and Team B operated in these two races? The teams each had identical goals—traveling 100 yards in 10 minutes—but they accomplished their objectives in completely different ways.
In Team A, the pair handled their assignment as a task. Each person’s role was relatively uncomplicated and straightforward. Team A realized they could complete the challenge of running down the field with little additional thought or strategizing.
But Team B had to engage, to deeply connect, and verbally motivate each other just to make it to the 50-yard line. Although the goal of reaching the opposite end zone was spelled out just as it was for Team A, the specific steps needed to navigate their way to the opposite end zone weren’t crystal clear. Team B had to discover the steps, learning as they progressed.
Although Team A indeed functioned as a team, each member “did his or her part” and no more. But Team B truly collaborated. Team B engaged in a discovery learning process that united them in a common, shared experience. Their efforts required motivation and determination. Team B encountered unexpected complexity in shifting the context of their thinking about what it meant to run or walk in a coordinated way, especially when two people of differing heights were bound together. Keeping their common goal in mind as they struggled to determine the best course of action, they created a unique coherence in their efforts, a kind of alignment that could actually be repeated the next time they had to run a three-legged race or coach someone else on how to do it.
Collaboration is not the same thing as teamwork. Teamwork is simply doing your part. Collaboration involves leveraging the power of every individual to bring out each other’s strengths and differences.
—Greg Cox, president and chief operating officer at Dale Carnegie, Chicago
How can we harness the deeper learning generated by the shared experiences we see in Team B? Can this type of learning be developed on a larger scale? How can we engage a handful of people—or even scores of teams working together—in running their own form of the three-legged race? What would be the impact on an entire group of employees equipped with the skill sets to drive true collaboration, all working shoulder to shoulder?
Collaboration has been a tricky beast for organizations to tame. Operating as the “invisible glue” that brings together discovery learning and performance in an environment of shared experience, collaboration as a core practice has proved challenging to embrace. More than just “doing your part,” Greg Cox, president of Chicago’s robust Dale Carnegie training operation, comments that “collaboration involves leveraging each other’s strengths and differences” when team members come together.8
In a world now absorbing the next billion workers, true collaboration will not be optional. Going forward, understanding how to capture the essence of the exchanges we saw in Team B rather than Team A will serve as the bedrock for the way people come together to innovate, develop new products and services, or design new business models or manufacturing capabilities. On a crowded planet, the collaboration skills of Team B will also be essential for governments and communities to function effectively.
A unique “superskill,” true collaboration pairs the power of discovery learning with diverse relationship-building and leadership skills now gaining new prominence in today’s business environment. As you will read further in Chapter 2, following the “global reset” that took place during the Great Recession of 2008, huge forces that operated within discrete domains we once described simply as research and development (R&D), marketing, and strategy are rapidly merging. They are taking new shape in the form of open innovation, customer-led development processes, and “smart” networked feedback mechanisms that move faster than typical annual planning cycles or cumbersome product design cycles. In a global business environment that increasingly values speed and nimble thinking to deliver breakthroughs, true collaboration now represents a superskill that will be fundamental for you and a high percentage of the individuals in your organization to possess. Less visible, and traditionally less valued, skills that marry the talents of the individual with interlocking webs of capability, such as data synthesis, leading and inspiring others, perceiving and communicating progress, and facilitating debate, will surge to the fore. No longer the province of nice to have, the superskill combinations present in true collaboration offer a new backbone for organizations to achieve high-impact results in the digital era.
This book offers insights into how you can inject true collaboration superskills into your operations and your own thinking. In the coming chapters you will learn about a process that leverages the innate creative capacities of the brain for developing context as well as for addressing complexity. You will learn how to leverage qualities that distinguish true collaboration from the more task-driven approaches that often dominate team efforts. Figure 1.1 offers a visual illustration of how collaboration relates to discovery learning and shared experience, moving beyond the mere performance of tasks. In essence, rather than continuing to function like the members of Team A, you’ll learn how to function like the members of Team B. True collaboration embraces:
Figure 1.1 True Collaboration Is the Nexus between Discovery Learning and Performance
Note: True collaboration embraces a broad array of skills that leverage discovery learning and doing within a context of shared experience.
A discovery learning mindset versus a pure task orientation
A belief in anticipating and creating rather merely reacting and responding
Presence of inspiration across multiple facets of both individual and team endeavors
Coherence of purpose
A dedication to elevating the performance of every team member
Connections to human and social networks of influence
Do these qualities sound different from the ones valued by your team? Do they draw upon ideas that feel new or seem broader than your current concept of what teamwork embraces?
True collaboration will allow you to reframe qualities that may have characterized many teams you’ve worked with in the past. It will also help you develop a new understanding for how collaborative groups can become a unique operating force within your enterprise. Whether you are part of a large, tradition-rich company with hierarchical layers or a small entrepreneurial endeavor, whether your organization is public or nonprofit, whether you are serving in an aging governmental body or an entrepreneurial operation still in its formative stages, Midnight Lunch offers a step-by-step guide for bringing true collaboration to the center of your efforts.
Collaboration allows us as individuals to understand something we didn’t have the background knowledge to grasp before.
—Art Fry, 3M Fellow and Technical Scientist, Inventor of Post-it Notes
The uniqueness underlying the backbone for true collaboration stems from its source: the world-changing teams of Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), one of history’s foremost inventors and innovators. The recipient of an astounding 1,093 US patents and 1,293 international patents, Edison’s vast innovation empire commanded an estimated $6.7 billion in market value by 1910, or roughly $100 billion today. Pioneering iconic products and services that we now view as central to the infrastructure of modern life—such as lighting, power, recorded sound, and storage batteries—the value of the markets and industries built on the shoulders of Edison’s contributions exceeds an estimated $1 trillion globally.9
Consider the value-creation engines within your organization right now. From a standing start, could it drive billions of dollars in revenue annually . . . and continue to do so for 40 years? Does it have a backbone like Edison’s true collaboration process to sustain it?
While Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google along with leaders of Global 50 companies such as Apple would no doubt answer “yes” to this question, consider that Edison managed to drive billions of dollars in market value with fewer people and fewer resources than a Global 50 operation. A flat organization with an employee base that, at its height, numbered a few thousand rather than tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, Edison’s ability to deliver value has much to teach us about collaboration and value creation in an era when resource constraints represent the norm for many organizations, both public and nonprofit.
Like the connective tissue in the human body, Edison’s true collaboration methods gave backbone, sinews, muscles, and tendons to his world-changing innovation process. Today, we can examine this connective tissue for timeless, value-driving approaches that bring new perspective to the growth and innovation efforts we seek in our digital world. With true collaboration as a force within your enterprise, you can build new capacity for capturing productivity growth from the next billion workers as well as achieve many other goals you envision for your organization.
THOMAS EDISON MASTERED COLLABORATION AS A FORCE FOR SUCCESS
When you call Thomas Edison to mind, what mental image do you see? A man in a lab coat? An inventor toiling away, surrounded by disassembled machine parts and half-read books? An entrepreneurial guy who worked by himself? Mindset author and psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck, an expert on the role of images and their impact on our thought patterns, comments on the reaction she frequently gets when asking audiences this question: “What comes to mind when you think about Thomas Edison? What is he doing?” The standard response Dweck receives is revealing:10
He’s in New Jersey. He’s standing in a white coat in a lab-type room. He’s leaning over a light bulb. Suddenly, it works! . . . He’s kind of a reclusive guy who likes to tinker on his own.
And yet, contrary to the perceptions we commonly hold of Thomas Edison, he was not a lone wolf inventor. Dr. Paul Israel, the world’s leading expert on Thomas Edison today and director of The Thomas A. Edison Papers archives at Rutgers University, comments, “From the earliest days of his inventing endeavors, Edison worked collaboratively with others. Even before he became a world famous inventor through his achievements at the Menlo Park laboratory, Edison sought out like-minded colleagues who could aid him with materials, prototyping, and the invention process itself.”11 Edison fostered a spirit of true collaboration among the prototypers and machinists he sought out in his young adult years as a budding telegrapher and inventor. Throughout his career, he carried the belief that working in teams magnified the skills of each member, yielding results that exceeded the individual capabilities of any single contributor.
Edison held wide-ranging passions that surfaced early in life, and remained with him for decades. Following a few frustrating months of traditional schooling, young Thomas’s mother, Nancy—a retired schoolteacher—allowed Edison to indulge his passions by homeschooling him for several years. His love for chemistry, mathematics, physics, telegraphy, the building of small motors, and the design of motorized equipment were fostered at a young age, ultimately spurring Edison to construct a large, independent laboratory—the storied Menlo Park, New Jersey, facility—in 1876. Israel notes that, via this world-changing facility, Edison “grafts an electrical and chemical laboratory onto a machine shop . . . creating a new kind of invention institution.”12 What Edison dubbed an invention factory, today we know as the world’s first managed research and development facility.
During a brief stint as a Western Union employee, various managers created hurdles for Edison in regard to his telegraph inventing efforts. Seeking a freer environment for developing his ideas, Edison’s Menlo Park lab enabled him to bring teams of skilled workers together in a collegial environment with few hierarchies and restrictions, encouraging small groups of employees to move freely from area to area devising products and prototypes spawned by Edison and his teammates. Figure 1.2 shows Edison surrounded by several of his Menlo Park colleagues. Although Edison generally served as the catalyst and primary driver of these inventing efforts, his small teams at Menlo Park yielded dozens of individuals who rose to become masters of the collaboration and innovation philosophies Edison modeled. A networked community where communication flowed with great regularity through frequent verbal exchanges as well as notebook sharing across teams, Menlo Park operated as a collaborative ecosystem with few equals.
Figure 1.2 Edison, Seated at Center Holding a Hat, Developed a Highly Collaborative Culture at His Menlo Park Laboratory
Source: National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site.
The collegial environment of the Menlo Park lab ultimately became a petri dish for an even larger-scale vision Edison held for the scope of research and development itself. In 1887, Edison designed a three-story laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, but also added extensive manufacturing capabilities clustered on a multiacre campus. At West Orange, Edison also built specialized outbuildings dedicated to specific forms of research, each within walking distance of the large, primary laboratory. The three-story laboratory combined machine-making equipment alongside small, no-frills offices where employees could gather to work in solitude or to meet jointly for experimentation. Edison also dedicated portions of this larger central facility to a massive library that housed 10,000 volumes, making Edison’s West Orange collection one of the top five largest libraries in the world at the turn of the century. Edison’s vision for true collaboration at West Orange uniquely combined a discovery learning environment with the resources needed for prototyping, scale testing, and then launching new products and services. Embracing a workforce drawn from diverse disciplines, “Edison recognized the importance of placing Ph.D. chemists and trained engineers alongside machinists and fellow inventors to realize his creations” inside this huge industrial laboratory complex.13
Importantly, not only did Edison demonstrate a penchant for collaborative engagement of teams within his laboratories, he brought true collaboration principles to many of the new companies he founded. A global thinker and businessman, one of Edison’s most famous collaborative endeavors—the formation of the Edison General Electric Company—remains a thriving organization more than 125 years later. Now known simply as GE, the company ranks as one of the top 50 largest public companies in the world. Edison ultimately founded more than 200 domestic and international companies during his lifetime, many specifically designed to manufacture his inventions. His collaborative efforts in research and development yielded dozens of commercially successful products for businesses and consumers.
The Edison laboratory worked as a collaborative organization. Laboratory employees were assigned to work on many projects while Edison supervised and involved himself, sometimes intensively, sometimes at arm’s length. Ultimately, Edison was the guiding force for the fruits of his laboratory.
—Mary Bellis, science writer and historian
Decades ahead of his time, in an age when most Industrial era companies were creating layers of supervisors and clerks, Edison instead built flat organizations and flat teams. Eschewing layers of management titles or fancy corner offices, Edison valued a combination of discovery learning and hands-on engagement as a means to train workers in a broad array of skills and disciplines. As you will read in more detail in Chapters 3 through 6, the depth and diversity of the collaborative project work he offered enabled Edison to attract, and cross-train, a rich talent pool. In a very real way, the underpinnings of Edison’s true collaboration approach served as the backbone to sustaining his innovation success.
Offering insights that can inform our modern notions of talent deployment, team design, employee engagement, and approaches to project complexity, Edison’s collaboration practices offer a framework for how organizations today can drive value through flatter, more streamlined structures now gaining traction in the digital age.
In addition to its reliance on flat team structure, another distinguishing feature of Edison’s true collaboration approach lies in its emphasis on discovery learning, an approach that galvanizes common goals and shared purpose. Decades later, we recognize Edison’s zest for discovery learning in the passion of leaders like Bill Gates, who created software that could unlock the vast potential of computers, and Steve Jobs, who sought to discover new ways for people to relate to technology. Like these modern-day innovators, Edison, in his time, unleashed in his workers the power of discovery learning to yield new knowledge and new processes. Tackling meaty challenges that held potential to touch the lives of millions, Edison awakened in his teams a thirst to dare something bold, the fruits of which still resonate in our world today.
Edison’s Legacy: The Fruits of True Collaboration
As the next billion workers transform our understanding of the nature of organizations themselves, we can draw upon Edison’s bold collaboration methods in modern times, contemporizing his approaches for the twenty-first century.
